Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rose felt like she hadn’t slept in a week. In and out with early mornings and late nights. She certainly hadn’t been the only one, of course. No, the entire base had been buzzing with activity to try to identify an object that had just popped through a crack in the wall between the world they lived in and some other parallel universe. About all they knew was that it wasn’t from their old universe and - as far as the Doctor and the UNIT scientists could estimate - the new crack had sealed itself up again. Granted, there were plenty of nerves to go around about thinning walls and shattered universes. Namely the one that they lived in. Hence the exceptionally long week. It had been all hands on deck, especially for those that had interdimensional travel on their resume.

The moon was already high and bright in London’s night sky as Rose made her way up to the Doctor’s lab. She was off-duty and had been ordered home. They’d apparently given him the same order a couple of hours before, but she could guarantee he hadn’t bothered to listen to it. He never did. Some things never changed.

He was exactly where she’d wagered that he’d be: bent over a table in the lab, tinkering with something or the other.  She stood in the doorway for a long moment before finally clearing her throat, startling him out of his absolute focus so that his head jerked upward, his glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose, and those impossibly large brown eyes of his staring owlishly over them at her. She offered a smile and held up the bag of food containers in her hand. “Thought you might be hungry.”

There was a beat of pause and she saw him about to deny it, but as if on cue, his stomach gave an audible growl of agreement. “‘Spose so,” he answered and swiveled his stool around to unfold from where he’d been hunched over. She let her gaze travel him up and down as he grabbed his suit jacket from where it had been draped over the table. “How ‘bout we go out?”

“Yeah? Whatcha thinkin’? There’s that little pizza shop just round —“

“I was thinkin’ something’ more along the lines of that little cafe on Pradador Three,” he offered, his head tilted in exaggerated thought. “Assuming Pradador Three’s still got all those nice little shops and cafes in this universe, of course.”

It took a half a moment longer than it should have to register what he was saying, and he must have watched it dawn across her face as a toothy grin started to stretch across his. Her head snapped to the corner of his lab where an other-worldly, grey cylinder that had stood for months now. In its place was a blue police box, the chameleon circuit finally capable of shifting it to the form they both knew so well. By the time she looked back at him, he was grinning ear to ear. “Fancy a night out?”

“It’s ready?”

“She’s ready,” he answered and took the bag of food from her, tossing it over towards the table. “Been waitin’ on you for her first trip out.”

“You better,” she laughed as she turned to the TARDIS, taking the ship in. At least from the outside, it looked identical. A choice, she imagined, but one she wholeheartedly agreed with. He moved with more hop in his step than their recent long hours should have allowed him and she stopped. “Everything's up and running, right? We’ll be back by morning?”

“We’ll be back in five minutes as far as this lot knows,” he answered with a wink and pushed the door open for her, stepping back so she could enter first. Well, probably not first. They’d both been in and out of the control room working on it since he had gotten the dimension stabilizers online and the tiny space had blossomed into a very plain version of the control room she used to know. A pocket dimension, he’d explained once. That’s how it was bigger on the inside, and while their work - okay, his work with her attempts to help under close supervision.  It had been the first time she’d actually done any real mechanical work on the TARDIS - had been centered in the control room, he’d explained that the TARDIS was growing the rest of the ship. The engine room, the library, and even a swimming pool that he’d admitted was always at the TARDIS’ whim and often ended him drenched when things went awry. It certainly wouldn’t be the same TARDIS that the other Doctor had taken to get he and Donna back to their world, but it would have echoes. Maybe more than that, depending how close the personalities of what was, in a way, mother and child lined up. 

The Doctor followed her in and the doors snapped shut behind them. Her gaze swept the control room and then followed him over to the panel, not missing how those long fingers ghosted over the metal there. Rose shook her head, Sarah Jane’s and her laugh coming to mind before she moved to join him. “So why Pradador Three?” she asked as he keyed in their coordinates. 

“Oh, they had those nice little shops with the pastries you liked. Whatcha-call-its.”

“That the technical term?” she teased and he flashed her another grin. 

“Very technical.”

“Thought we were goin’ for dinner?”

“Pastries can be dinner. Since when can’t pastries be dinner?”

She snorted. “Gonna have to do a bit more runnin’ than we have been.”

He turned, his expression suddenly more serious than she’d been expecting. “You’re alright with that?”

The meaning struck home. It wasn’t like they’d lived what anyone would call a quiet life in the last few years of living in Pete’s World. There’d been aliens and tears between words, constant threats looming with what it all meant. They’d worked on the TARDIS and provided insights to UNIT that no one on this world could have had. They’d barely stopped, but there was no running like the running that you did with a Time Lord in his TARDIS. If she didn’t want it, if she wanted a nice night in with sandwiches and a semi-decent night’s sleep rather than popping off to all corners and fitting days into just a few minutes… well, now was the time to say so. And he was offering it, not because it’s what he wanted, but because he loved her.

Rose pursed her lips together, holding that impatient gaze of his for a long moment before the smile cracked through and she reached forward, snagged him by the lapels, and pulled him into a kiss. “Allons-y,” she murmured teasingly and she felt his own smile break free as he stole another quick kiss before pulling away. 

“Allons-y!” he shouted as he threw the switch and the TARDIS wheezed to life, hurdling them through time and space. Rose and her Doctor. 

—-

Pradador Three was exactly where and when he expected it to be, which was certainly a good sign for the first trip out in the freshly regrown TARDIS. The Doctor had briefly weighed taking her out on his own for a test flight. Just a hop to the moon and back. It would have been quick and easy and a safety precaution that was entirely unnecessary. No, the TARDIS was a living ship, her consciousness fully capable of providing enough information to calculate if all systems required to fling them through time and space were operational or not. A lifetime ago he might have done it on instinct, so used to the TARDIS being his only lasting companion among the stars, but so much had changed in the last few years. He found he didn’t want to bop in and out on his own. He didn’t have to be alone anymore, and, while it had taken some time and a great deal of effort on both of their part, he’d grown very comfortable in that reality that they lived day in and day out. Sure, it came with roots that still left him feeling restless and often a little jittery, but now that they could travel again, they’d do it together. Rose wasn’t just a companion - not that she ever really had been, truth be told - she was it. Even the TARDIS herself seemed to agree. No other human had ever been able to bond with a Time Lord’s ship before, but this TARDIS had allowed her to as they built her up together. He still wasn’t sure if it was remnants of her time as the Bad Wolf or if it was an extension of his own feelings towards her, but it was, without any question, their TARDIS now. Strange how right felt. 

“It’s just like I remember it,” Rose’s voice cut through his thoughts as they pushed through the busy market space, humanoids and aliens of all kinds haggling and purchasing all round them. 

“A few changes. Take a look there,” the Doctor answered, pointing between two exceptionally tall females with long necks, spotted skin, and lashes that curled out several inches from their base. Beyond them, where a collection of open-air booths sat in their own universe, a much larger, more permanent building had taken their place. It didn’t feel too modern next to the rest of the market, with open windows and sloped roof made of the same material as the market booths. 

Rose’s nose wrinkled a little. “Think the pastries are still in there?”

“Only one way to find out.”

She grinned, slipped her hand in his, and they were off. They dodged between different species, the excitement of travelling again for the first time in several years filling them both with more energy than they had right to have after the exceptionally long week. 

Inside was much like the outside: a collection of food and shops and booths selling trinkets from all over the galaxy. Pradador Three had long since become a melting pot of cultures and a place known for all of their little delights. Rose had loved the pastries - and how could she not? Filled with fruits and creams only found on this moon and nowhere else - but something else had caught her eye the last time they’d been there. He’d barely noticed it back then. Why would he? Women and their… ah. There it was. Diagonal to the pastries and one row back. Just as it should be. Thankfully Rose had spotted the vendor they’d come for, already perusing the options and sorting through the credits he’d procured before entering the market proper. He took the moment to slip away unnoticed. 

The Doctor kept a side eye on her, always making sure that he could appear perfectly distracted should her attention swivel over on him. There was plenty to keep it as the shop owner provided samples, explaining the fine ingredients used to create the treat. A small smile touched his lips as he watched her expression that had been so very, very tired recently light up. Before he knew it, he’d stumbled into the booth he’d been aiming for. 

“Looking for something special?” an old, tiny woman with magenta eyes and black hair - streaked blue as if that might be how her species greyed - asked. She sat on a hover stool behind the old wood of the booth, her intricate cloak that was draped loosely over the crown of her head  the same colour as her eyes mixed with greens and yellows. She lifted a bony hand, golden bangles striking together to give off a musical tone, and swept it out over the rows of jewelry. “From all corners of the galaxy. This blue would suit you nicely.”

The Doctor’s dark eyes flickered to what might have been a tie pin the same colour as the TARDIS. Interesting. He wondered if she might have a low-level empathic trait that allowed her to find pieces that suited interested parties. He offered her a charming smile. “Not for me,” he clarified. “My… friend -“ oh, now that word just didn’t feel deep enough when connected to Rose - “and I were here some time back. She saw a ring. Gold, bit glowy with dusting of diamonds worked into it band and -“

“Forgive,” the woman said with a dip of her head, “but I do not have such a ring.”

“Never?” 

“Not ever. Perhaps on the other side where the silver merchant sell? Some of their rings appear gold…”

The Doctor felt his chest tighten in disappointment. “Maybe so,” he answered, knowing full well it wasn’t theirs. Just because he wasn’t actively focused when she’d seen it didn’t mean that his mind hadn’t logged the details way back in a corner to be accessed later if need be. No. This might be Pradador Three, but it was still Pete’s World. Pete’s Universe, more like. Things were different in the tiniest and the biggest of ways. 

“There you are!” Rose called from a couple of booths over. “Come over here! I don’t remember this one. It’s a fruit that’s ‘sposed to be good for ya, but tastes like those fancy chocolates Mum likes! We should take some home.”

“Thanks,” the Doctor murmured as he smiled back at the blonde woman who he loved. He shoved his hands in his pockets as he made his way over to her. “Oi, sure, if you want to be the one to tell her we’re off travelin’ again.”

Rose’s smile faded just a little and he was sure she was picturing the same thing he was: Jackie Tyler in full rant mode about galavanting all across the galaxy and risking her daughter’s life. The fact that it was a decision they’d made together wouldn’t matter in the slightest. “Well,” the daughter in question said after a moment, “not like they were going to make it back anyway.” She reached into the cloth to-go bag, took out a donut hole-sized pastry, and popped it into her mouth. She quirked a dark eyebrow at him, offering a second pastry out to him, and laughed around the mouthful of sweets as she snapped it away when he made a go for it. 

“Oh? I see how it is,” he chuckled. 

“Yeah, just like it,” she said as she grabbed another one and held it up to pop it in his mouth too. Her smile softened as she looked up at him and he felt his single heart flutter a bit in his chest. “So, you over there looking at some sorta fancy space rings?”

He blinked innocently at her. “What would I be doing that for?”

“Oh who knows,” she teased, thumbing what he could only assume was a bit of the powdered frosting from his lips before stealing a quick kiss and dropping her free hand back into his to start further into the market.

The Doctor tightened his fingers around hers, the smile never leaving his face. Intellectually he’d known just how much he’d missed this, but even he’d underestimated how utterly right it felt, even when things didn’t always work out exactly as planned. He had her, and she had him. Everything else was just a tangible symbol of what they already knew that could be figured out in time.

—-

“It can never be just a date with you,” Rose teased as the engines quieted, the TARDIS settling into place. “Always have to have an ulterior-universe-saving-motive, don’tcha?”

His lips quirked up at the corners as he bounced his way around the control console, still giddy with energy that they hadn’t had to run off on this trip. “Oh yes, saving the universe one pastry at a time. If only it were that easy.”

Rose rolled her eyes good naturedly at him and moved to link her arm through his as they started for the door. “You think the answer to the tears are out there though?” It wasn’t like the thought hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind, even if they’d all hoped to find both the answer and the solution a little closer to home. After the other Doctor had left with Donna and the TARDIS, they’d all assumed that the rift had been - like he said it would be - closed and sealed up. For good. But then debris started to drop through at random intervals, then the occasional crossover either by accident or intent. It became obvious that, even if they might not have a pathway directly between the two universes that they had been traveling through, not all the tears were sealed. In fact, if the sheer number of incidents were anything to go by, they were increasing. And despite the advanced technology that Pete’s World had compared to the one that she had been born into, humanity was still mostly confined to the Earth. There was no galavanting across the galaxy looking for answers. Until now. It didn’t hurt that they had a spaceship with a personality and likely as much of a knack for finding trouble as its predecessor.

“Weeeeeeell,” the Doctor drawled out as the doors swung open to let them out into the early evening air, the TARDIS tucked away in the alley a block down from the little terrace house that they rented. “Just about four years of beatin’ our heads against every dead end we could find, I can think of worse theories. It’s a big universe out there, Rose Tyler, and somethin’ is causing these tears.”

“And if this TARDIS is anything like her mum, she’ll take us right to the source.” She reached into her jacket pocket, fishing around for the key to their place. Her fingers touched it and she pulled it out just in time. 

“Not lookin’ forward to explaining how we got to the center of it when we do.”

Rose snorted at that. “You’re not the one that’ll get an earful.”

“Sure your mum thinks I’m due for another slap.”

“I mean, not for that.”

He stopped halfway across the street. “What for then?” he demanded, all indignant obliviousness that was sometimes endearing. Most of the time. At least when she didn’t have to come up with excuses to keep her mum off their backs.

Rose dropped her hand into his and yanked him out of the way of oncoming traffic. As soon as they reached the curb, he hit the brakes again and it was clear that she either had to fill him in on what he’d been missing or lie to him. She loosed a sigh. “It’s nothing.” 

“Not if she wants to take my head off over it.”

“Honest. She’s just a bit ol’ fashion sometimes. Well, you know. We’ve been here four years, traveled together before that, and --” He was staring at her blankly and she could have kicked herself for letting it slip, because he was going to make her come out and say it and it wasn’t even his fault. “She thinks we should be engaged or somethin’ by now.”

She could practically see the gears turning, but he still looked so incredibly confused. Despite the logical side of her brain reminding her that she knew him, she knew he wasn’t going anywhere no matter what he did or didn’t say. The reminder didn’t get her far as she felt her temper flare to push aside the embarrassment and she dropped her hand from his as she started forward towards their front door. “Forget it. It’s stupid, really.”

“No…no, not stupid. Just didn’t think Jackie’d be looking for it, is all. We don’t really do that much.”

That stopped her again. “Do what?”

“The whole -” he flapped his hand around as he tried to come up with the words - “engage, marry, for all the lives… thing. I mean, I’m over 900 years old. Your mum does remember I’m not human, yeah? Bit of a different way of doin’ things.”

“But you did tell me you had a family on Gallifrey,” she pressed. Not just a family. A granddaughter. That had been a bizarre discussion to have with the love of her life that had never looked that much older than her, even when she’d first met him.

“Bit odd in and of itself,” he muttered in a tone that told her she wasn’t ready to go down that particular rabbit hole. “But no. It’s exceptionally rare for two Time Lords to bond for life like that.” 

She forced a breath out through her nose, desperate to steady the frustration she hadn’t really been ready to feel on the subject as quickly as possible. “Right. It’s just Mum being Mum, that’s all,” This was not how she wanted to end a particularly lovely evening that they’d had out.

He caught her wrist, stopping her momentum and she finally turned to meet his gaze. “I’ve never been particularly known for keeping to Gallifreyan norms,” he answered, his tone strangely serious without the world imploding around them. “I’m with you for as long as you’ll have me, Rose. When you bonded with the TARDIS I… Well I thought you knew that.”

She found herself lost in those eyes for a long moment. “Oh,” she managed a little breathlessly. She had and she hadn’t. He’d made it very clear that day at Bad Wolf Bay that he wanted to be with her the rest of their lives, but the day he’d taken her into the TARDIS and helped her form a psychic link with it the way he’d always had… she hadn’t realized. It made sense now that he was stumbling his way through it. He’d shared with her a link that would be forever for them, and wasn’t that what promising to spend your life with somebody was? 

Rose blinked, realizing she was still just staring at him and his expression had become just a little tighter with each passing moment of silence. She let a small, teasing smile touch her lips again. “And good thing too, because you’re stuck with me, mister.”

A relieved, goofy grin lit his face and pulled a laugh from her. Well, she hadn’t expected to find this out, but that was how they stumbled into things: halfway by accident. In the years following the metacrisis they’d had to find a way to navigate all that they’d been through and the questions they had following it. They’d gotten there, but they were also getting there. Maybe that’s just what life was: always something new to find out and figure out. At least it was never boring when the two of them were involved. 

 Rose snagged his hand again, tugging him towards the door. She had every intention of pulling him through it, up the narrow stairs to the top floor, and straight to their bedroom, but almost as soon as they entered she heard a familiar voice from back in the dining nook on the ground floor.  

“Not sure when exactly they’ll be back, mind you,” Jackie Tyler said. “Rose seemed to think they’d be working late. I sent her to his lab with some of those tiny sandwiches they both like. Not that he’d ever say thank you or anything of the like. I saved his life once, I did. Christmas Eve a few years back. He was on death’s door and I got him a spot of tea. Right as rain. Never a thank you one.”

The usual banter of the subject was filed away immediately as both Rose and the Doctor froze instantly, the door still halfway pushed open and they hadn’t even made it more than a step past the threshold. It was a miracle that the door itself hadn’t squeaked, but one wrong step on a loose floorboard would let both Rose’s mum and whoever the hell was in their home know they were there before they knew exactly what was going on. 

The Doctor shot her a pointed, silent look and Rose nodded, digging into her pocket for her cell phone. No messages. Okay. That meant that no one had been there long. How and why Mum had managed to get into their place while they weren’t home would be tabled until they knew everything was okay. 

“Just let me ring her and see where they’re at,” Jackie said from the room that emptied out into the tiny garden that they’d contemplated landing the TARDIS in prior to playing it safe and landing in the alley. Well, at least their instincts were still sharp, even if Jackie’s weren’t. 

Panic was palpable between them, but there was no way to get rid of it or even silence the phone in time to stop the ringing. Do You Want To by Franz Ferdinand sounded off, somehow louder than it ever had before from her phone. The upbeat song bounced off the hardwood floors, the carpet put down doing nothing to damper it, and she instantly heard the telltale sound of a chair scooting across the dining nook floor. “Rose, sweetie, is that you?”

Rose could have killed her in that instant. “Yeah, Mum,” she answered, trying to play it like she had no idea anyone else was there. “Whatcha doin’ over?”

“Oh, just popped by for a chat. We haven’t talked in forever.”

“I saw you when you dropped the sandwiches off,” Rose answered before she could stop herself. 

“Yeah,” Jackie answered, her voice drawing closer, “but you know how a mother is. Well, guess you don’t. Not yet. Oi, Doctor!” she greeted as she rounded into the hall. “You’ve got some colleagues in there. No idea what colleagues know you ‘n not Rose.”

“ Mum !” Rose hissed, motioning for her to come closer and desperately hoping she’d catch the vibe in the room. She only about halfway did, but at least she was moving forward as she grumbled loudly about not understanding what all the fuss was about. The Doctor moved past her and inched his way between the Tylers and whatever threat there might just be in the next room.

“Oh, what’s all this fuss?” Jackie demanded. “They said they were your friends!”

“Mum, who do we know in this world besides our family and UNIT that’d come ‘round without warning?” Rose snapped and saw his hand at his pocket. The only thing he had there was the sonic screwdriver he’d put together from scratch. Unless the enemy was mechanical, it wasn’t going to do them much good.

Footsteps echoed and everyone tensed. Rose pulled her mum back behind her, kicking herself for going along with the Doctor’s no gun policy for their home. If this went badly and they lived through it, she’d at least have leverage to push back on that.

Two figures appeared down at the end of the hall, passing from the kitchen and moving past the stairwell. A man and a woman. The man was young and fit, looking much more like a soldier than any UNIT scientist that might know the Doctor and not her. His clothes were bland and might fit in anywhere - which, to her training, made them stand out even more - and his blond hair was slicked back in a tight style. His eyes were sharp, focused on her, and she saw his hand hovering like he was ready to pull a weapon at any time.

The woman was petite, a bit older, and her dark, curly hair was braided from temples back to the nape of her neck to keep it out of her way. If Rose had thought the man’s eyes were intense, those grey eyes were fixed on her Doctor, and she already had the weapon drawn. It didn’t look like anything that UNIT had access to. “Don’t move.”

“What’s all this about?” Jackie howled, looking around, but Rose shook her head at her and hoped beyond hope she would know better than to try to bolt and grab her daughter along with her.

The man pulled a small device that was similar to the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver from his pocket and swept it over then, pulling it back up to view the readouts. “Negative. Single hearts show that… Wait.”

The woman looked over at the readings without dropping her weapon. “Traces of the Time Vortex on you both, but there’s only partial Time Lord DNA on that one. Unless….” Her steely gaze snapped to the Doctor. “You’re using a chemlian arch.”

“I’m really not,” he answered carefully.

“Close the door. All three of you, inside.”

“Wait just a minute now!” Jackie said loudly. 

A quick look to her Doctor confirmed what Rose’s instincts told her. She reached out to her mum and laid a gentle hand on her arm. “Let him handle this.”

“Handle what, exactly?”

Rose didn’t answer, but instead turned to the Doctor who had his head cocked to one side curiously. “Look at you. No one I know from this world. Shouldn’t be from the other. Of all the tears between universes, that one’s shut off at the spigot.” He took a step forward, hyper-focused and took a deep breath as he did. “Those clothes - costumes, really - and that air about you. No…No. Yes .” His eyes somehow managed to widen a fraction more and he tipped up on his toes in anticipation. “You’re Time Lords. That means --”

“Doctor,” the woman cut him off sharply, “I am Darkel and this is Chalmirraflexon. We have been tasked by the High Council to bring you in. You once loved this planet. Please do not cause their inhabitants any harm as we apprehend you.”

“-- Gallifrey stands,” he finished, the awe in his voice echoing off their walls like the women addressing him hadn’t just stated that she was trying to arrest him. “In this universe, Gallifrey stands.”

“Chal-a-mi-wha?” Jackie demanded shrilly. “What kinda name is that? Is this a prank? Some sorta office prank that they gotta go all the way with? Well, I’ll tell you somethin’, lady. I’m your boss’ boss’ boss’ wife. There’ll be none of tha’ around --”

Darkel moved, her weapon flashing to life in a streak of bright white as it struck Jackie. Rose screamed as her mother crumbled to the hallway floor, and she turned an infuriated look on the perpetrator. Before she could get more than a couple of steps forward, the Doctor stopped her. “She’s fine. Just unconscious,” he promised. His attention turned back to Darkel, even if his gaze had never left her. “I don’t know you, so there’s a better than even chance you don’t know me personally either. Whatever you think I’ve done, I haven’t. We’re not from here.”

“A clever tale to spin,” Darkel answered, her weapon fixed on him now and she thumbed a control. “Don’t think that I’ll simply stun you, Doctor. I know who you are. What you are.”

Rose risked a glance at him and she could see him working out their options in that clever mind of his. “Alright,” he  said with his hands outstretched and visible. “Alright. What do you want?”

“You’ll come with us to face Time Lord justice.”

“And you’ll let them go?”

“Doctor!” Rose snapped and received only an outstretched hand intended to keep her from rushing forward in response.

“We have no use for the Human race in this time. You’re the one Rassilon demands must pay the price.”

“Rassilon. Right. He’s still Lord President then?”

“Indeed he is.”

“Alright then,” the Doctor breathed, risking a brief and pointed glance back at Rose who stood between him and her now-unconscious mother. He held out his arms dramatically, as if offering his wrists for handcuffs. “Then take me to the Lord President!”

----

They weren’t particularly chatty, not that that was any overwhelming surprise. To his relief, Rose didn’t try to jump in the middle of things just yet. That didn’t mean he expected her to sit around and twindle her thumbs once her mother came back around. Once she knew Jackie was safe, the Doctor couldn’t have stopped her from following him if he’d tried. Not with the TARDIS that she’d helped to build sitting just a ways down that would, like any good TARDIS, be able to return to Gallifrey almost on auto-pilot. No, she’d be along sooner rather than later. The Doctor just hoped he had things sorted by the time she got there.

Darkel and Chalmirraflexon shuffled him off towards a Mini Cooper that was parked against the opposite curb, opened the door, and shoved him inside. The Doctor stumbled a bit as he fell into the pocket dimension that was the inside of their TARDIS that they’d arrived in. Darkel’s TARDIS, he decided as she followed in and it gave a subtle but warm greeting. He took a look around, soaking everything in and trying to glean anything from his surroundings that might help him make sense of where Gallifrey stood in this world. Had the Time War even happened? If not, they very well could be at their peak. Perhaps his other self had only now taken off with his TARDIS and they had a more forceful reaction in this world than in his own. Or perhaps the Time War had happened, just as it had back home, and if so, had Gallifrey simply survived or had they won decisively? As much as it pained him, if it was the latter, they could be in for some very uncomfortable times ahead and decisions that he’d never thought he’d have to make again when it came to the Time Lords versus the universe at large. He remembered the final days at the outer edges of the Time Locked war. He remembered the extremes that the High Council had taken and how, after they had resurrected Rassilon, no action that would win them the war had become too extreme. The Doctor - the version of himself that to that day he hated to remember - might have agreed, if only they’d come to terms on what winning truly meant. In the end, everything burned. Time Lords and Daleks alike. They’d burned and he’d set the blaze. If the Rassilon that he’d known was the same Rassilon ruling over his homeworld now, there was a better than even chance he’d find the source of the tears that continued to open up in time and space between realities. 

The TARDIS wasn’t staffed like it would have been at the height of the war, nor were there the scant few flying the empathic machine with haunted eyes and shaking hands that would have signified the end of the Time War in his universe. Neither did the un-introduced staff wear military uniforms. They weren’t any uniforms that he recognized, now that he thought about it, which likely meant they were with the Celestial Intervention Agency. Yep. That’d make sense.

They hurtled through the Time Vortex without another murmur in his direction, but there wasn’t even a fraction of a moment in which there weren’t eyes on him. There was a wariness there, though not just of a stranger. No, Pete’s World’s Doctor either had done something truly terrible or had been set up so that everyone believed that he did. Finally, after five minutes of unending silence, the Doctor stepped as close to the forcefield holding him in as he dared without getting zapped back against the wall. “So,” he drawled out to the four guards that had remained with him after escorting him back: two on either side of the field with their backs to him and the other two standing across, their backs against the solid hallway and their eyes never leaving the Doctor. He wondered if they actually blinked. If he ever ran across the Weeping Angels again, he wanted those two on his side. “Care to fill me in on what you think I did?”

There was a flicker of emotion in response, but only a flicker. If he hadn’t been staring directly at the man he never would have seen it. Instead he stared directly at him, clear blue eyes fixed and dark blond brows hooded over them in a serious fashion. Right. Well. Worth a try, he supposed.

He felt it when they stopped, but no one in his line of sight moved. He was there for another unbearable amount of time waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and -- There. They were moving again. A shift of some sort that caught his attention, but then there was nothing again. Just more waiting and waiting and waiting.

Finally the door slid open down the hall and the Doctor popped to his feet, the rubber soles of his high tops giving off the tiniest of squeaks. There were three sets of eyes on him with that now, the fourth looking down the way at whoever was approaching. Another nameless somebody that had likely gotten middling grades at the Academy but had proven to take orders well enough strolled down the corridor, nodded wordlessly to one of the guards, who turned back to the Doctor. “Step back.”

“Oh, you do have a voice!” the Doctor cheered before he could help himself, but did as instructed as he watched the guard go for his staser at his side.

They moved him out of the holding area, through the control room, and out of the TARDIS. He saw the reason for the move after they’d arrived. Apparently he was deemed too dangerous to move on foot and they’d delivered Darkel’s TARDIS directly to the Panopticon’s central chambers. The High Council was not in session, but instead Rassilon stood in the center, dressed in his scarlet and gold robes with his high-back collar and partial headdress leaving him with the regal look that the Doctor knew he took great pride in. The ancient one of Gallifrey. The Time Lord that had founded Gallifreyan culture. He’d lived his lives. Again and again. And then they’d brought him back. There had been days that the Doctor had wondered just what that process did inside someone’s mind.

“Lord President,” the Doctor greeted, motioning a bit even though his wrists were still cuffed in front of him.

“Doctor,” Rassilon answered. “You changed your face. Perhaps we were closer to capturing you than we realized.”

The Doctor let the fractured piece of information bounce around in his mind for a brief moment before answering. “There’s been a mistake here.”

“Don’t bother. Darkel has already warned us of your lies. Thin and easily undone. You’ve grown careless, Doctor.”

“Then undo them,” the younger Time Lord offered, receiving a skeptical and calculating look from the Lord President. “Oh, don’t be like that. You and I both know that all you have to do is take a look. Not even a chameleon arch could hide my thoughts from you of all Time Lords.”

“Your attempt at flattery will not protect you.”

“But the truth will. Come on now, it’s quick and easy and I’m offering. I’d rather get down to the heart of all this.”

“Which is?”

The Doctor’s previously amused expression darkened a little. “The fractures between worlds that were supposed to close when the Reality Bomb in my original universe was reversed. That door may have closed, but you can’t tell me that you haven’t seen what’s been happening since.”

Rassilon stared at him for a long moment, looking strangely confused. He moved forward, waving off an advisor that tried to stop him. “The only reason I deem to entertain this is that I know you to be an intelligent man. Mad, perhaps, but always intelligent. Even madness should not have spun such a loose tale.”

“I’m not lying.” the Doctor answered firmly.

“Know that if you’ve laid a trap - or if he’s laid a trap - it will be the end of all of your lives, Doctor.”

Dark brows drew together. “If who’s --?”

 But he didn’t have a chance to get the question out as Rassilon reached forward, his hand touched the side of the younger Time Lord’s face and the cool metal of his rings were the last thing that the Doctor knew before the connection was made through physical contact. It was two-way, and he heard a guttural scream that must have been his own as reality erupted around him in a single Moment, never to end.

Chapter Text

The logical side of her mind told her that he’d done what he’d done to protect them, but the other side was bloody pissed . They’d had such a nice evening and she’d had every intention of making it even better until they found two uninvited Time Lords in their home that had stunned her mum and taken off with her Doctor. 

Jackie had come ‘round a few minutes after they left and Rose had felt terrible rushing her to it. She couldn’t just leave her, but she couldn’t just leave the Doctor either. They’d mistaken him for someone else - possibly the Doctor of this world - and had hauled him off to who knew where. He needed her help. 

“How ya gonna get to him anyway, sweetheart?” Jackie asked from her place on the couch, a cup of tea in her hands as she curled a little deeper into the oversized pillows. “You haven’t got a way to follow him!”

“Just let me worry about that,” Rose answered, checking her phone again. Where the hell was he?

As if on cue, a knock came at the door. Rose launched forward and down the narrow stairs, flinging it open when she reached it. Pete stood there, a bit startled, but softened almost immediately. “Sorry it took me so long. Had to drop Tony off at my mum’s.”

“They’re all gone now. You coulda brought him,” Rose said, but brushed it off immediately. She tipped up on her toes and kissed her dad’s cheek. “Mum’s upstairs. Got stunned by an alien gun, so better get her checked out. I’ll be back soon!”

“Wait, Rose!” he shouted as she darted past him  and out the door. It was fine. No matter how long it took, once she found the Doctor they’d be back in five minutes. She just had to find him. Somehow. 

Her boots grabbed at the pavement as she circled into the alley, the familiar blue police box waiting for her. She burst through the front door, an upgraded palm reader with her imprint successfully tested in real time, and the TARDIS purred to life around her. “I need you to take me to the Doctor,” she instructed, circling around to the console she always saw him enter coordinates into. It remained blank. “Oh, c’mon,” she murmured lowly, “don’t do this to me. Can’t you work for me too?” Her fingers brushed the console and it lit up. “Oh. Okay. Right then.” 

Coordinates needed, was scrawled across the screen. She’d never seen the TARDIS communicate quite so clearly before, but she wasn’t going to knock it. 

“Where… he said they were Time Lords, so they’re from Gallifrey, right? That’s a good place to start if you can’t track him. Take us to Gallifrey.”

The TARDIS lurched into motion, the wheezing of the engines filling Rose with hope. The TARDIS understood her. It was working with her, and if it’d work with her, she could find the Doctor. 

There was a jolting feeling of being hurled through what the Doctor called the Time Vortex. It felt like it left half of her behind and took a few moments longer than it should to catch up. Or maybe that was just her nerves. She’d jumped into this without a plan, without weapons or ammunition. If she needed to fight to get him out, she had nothing. Instead she’d done what he would have: hurled herself through time and space to protect the one she loved. She’d figure out the rest. 

The TARDIS settled down, dropping out of the Vortex and coming slowly to a landing. With each pulse that would have made it visible from the outside, a terrified scream came into range. She knew that voice. 

Rose jumped forward, all thought of strategy left behind as the Doctor’s cry rang out and she slammed through the doors of the TARDIS to empty out into a strange, otherworldly chamber. Lit in green with foreign, circular writing etched into its walls, it looked like it should have held more than the handful of people in it that stood around. In the center were two men, one she didn’t recognize in very fancy robes, and he had a hand against the Doctor’s temple, the latter’s cry dying out as he staggered a bit when the fancy man released him. Rose stood frozen for a moment, watching it play out, and the Doctor didn’t seem to know she was there. He appeared to be locked in place, knees half bent as if they were in the process of giving way but never quite getting there, and his head tilted up a little. As Rose finally moved and circled around him, she saw his eyes wide and staring unseeing at the ceiling above. He blinked once, a strange and haunted look lingering as he slowly  locked eyes with the other man. “I didn’t know it could be worse,” he croaked, and his knees finally finished giving way and he crashed hard to the floor. 

Rose rushed over, dropping instantly to his side. “Doctor?”

He was completely out, limp in her arms and eyes closed. Rose heard the man in the robes shift his stance. “He was… overwhelmed… by what he saw,” he said, sounding a bit overwhelmed himself. 

“And what was that, exactly?” Rose demanded. “What’d you do to him?”

“He will be well in time. I viewed his mind to verify the story he told. He spoke the truth, which makes you…” There was a fraction of a pause, as if he were searching for her name or trying to decide which one fit best. “Rose Tyler.”

“That’s me,” she answered, though the confirmation sounded more snappy than she’d intended. 

“We do not allow aliens in our city walls,” the man said and she finally looked towards him. “But for you  - because of what you are to him - we will make an exception.”

“Oh gee, thanks,” she grumbled. “Can we leave then? Now that you’ve gotten what you wanted?”

“His last regeneration seems to have left him… weaker in some ways. He needs rest. I’ll have our people prepare chambers for the evening. Tomorrow I will speak to him about what he saw and how we can work together to resolve it.” 

“Resolve what?”

“The fractures in time and space that the Doctor of this world has created.”

Rose swallowed hard. That’s it. Her clever man was always chasing the problem down to its source, even if he had to get himself arrested and mind melded to do it. She looked down and saw his eyelids flutter as if he were struggling against some unseen enemy even in unconsciousness. She bent over, her lips brushing his forehead. “Don’t you dare leave me,” she whispered. “I love you.”

A soft breath left him and she could have sworn she heard his response back. 

Boots on polished marble sounded as men in ornate robes surrounded them. The one that had done this took a step forward. “Rise, child.”

“I’m not leaving him.”

“No. Not this day.”

The words echoed ominously as she stood, but didn’t dare move more than was needed to gather the Doctor up and move him to a place where he could rest. 

—-

It felt like he was floating, weightless and drifting. He couldn’t be sure, but in the distance he thought he could hear the hammering that had filled the year that never was and he wondered, just for a moment, if the same madness that had taken his oldest friend-turned-enemy was creeping up to his own mind, threatening to drag him down into its depths. 

His eyes snapped open and he found his feet beneath him now. He squinted against the blinding twin suns, shielding his face from the hot breeze that seemed to always be blowing outside of the protective dome encasing the Citadel on Gallifrey. He could feel the gritty sand against his face and the mental touch on his mind, just out of reach. A whisper locked away, but maybe with just a few more steps he could reach it… One, then another. He felt like he was sinking, but just ahead, through the swirling, bright sand he could see a box with someone sitting on it. He blinked and she was gone. Again and he was in front of her, all golden hair and flaming eyes that reminded him of that horrible day that she’d been willing to soak up the Heart of the TARDIS itself to find him. To save him. 

This wasn’t Rose, though. The figure tilted her head, her lips pouting, but they didn’t move as he heard her voice swirling in his head:  No more. No more no more no more. 

Then, like any good nightmare, the landscape shifted. 

Everything was burning as he stood on the streets of Arcadia, droves of people fleeing on all sides as Daleks swooped in, taking aim with their extermination protocols taking out every man, woman, and child in their path. He remembered this, even if he often tried to disassociate himself from it. This was the last day of the Time War. That final day when he’d sealed the fate of friend and foe alike. To stop the killing, he’d massacred them all. 

“Can you do it?” a small voice startled him, drawing his attention down to where a child stood before him. One of 2.47 billion that would simply cease to exist before they’d even truly begun to live. “Did you stop it?”

The answer died in his throat, choking him, and he felt his vision blur, but this time it wasn’t from the smoke and the dust. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”

An explosion stole his attention and when he looked back, the child was gone. All that remained was fire and ash and death and his head was pounding with each breath he took. Today was the day it all ended. And no. He didn’t stop it. He’d been the one that ended it for them all.

Doctor ?

The voice cut through the noise and the smoke, drawing his gaze up to the burning skies of his home planet. He knew that voice. He would know that voice. He would always know that voice. Somehow it was so different than the woman that had worn her face just a few moments before. “Rose,” he breathed, her name riding out on his breath and shattering the nightmare around him. 

He blinked, a room coming into focus. White and sterile and far too bright for his aching head. The Doctor groaned, but looked over as a gentle hand pressed against his forehead to smooth his hair back. Despite everything, a smile touched his lips. “Hello.”

“Hi,” she greeted back. “How’re you feeling?”

“Rotten,” he acknowledged before he could think to lie about it. He squeezed his eyes closed, pointlessly trying to will the headache away, and she pressed a kiss to his forehead. That seemed to help a little. 

“I was startin’ to think he’d really hurt you,” Rose murmured, forcing the Doctor to struggle through his memories to follow back how he’d gotten there and who he was.

 That’s right. Rassilon. He’d sent a TARDIS worth of Time Lords to Earth to pick him up think he was — 

“But you’re alright, though?” she pressed.

“Oh yeah. Nothing like a psychic overload to knock ya straight off your feet, but --” he looked at her, holding her gaze and intentionally softening his tone -- “I’m alright.”

There was a moment he was sure she was weighing that, but in the end she gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “Alright. Answers then. So who is he? Is this really Gallifrey?”

“Yeah,” he breathed, shifting in the bed and trying to get a better view of where they were. A medical facility. Brilliant. The next to last place he would have wanted to wake up in. He felt a tug and reached up with his free hand to pull at the medical equipment attached to his temples that had been giving the physician a read out of his brainwaves. An alarm began to beep and he ignored it. “As to who… Pompous man in fancy robes?”

“That’s the one.”

“Rassilon. Current Lord President, founder of what we know as Time Lord culture.”

Her dark eyes widened as she shifted back, giving him room to sit up on the bed. He found more machines connected and systematically started removing them as he did. “You’re over nine hundred, so how old’s that make him?” she asked as the doors to the private room gave a subtle click of a lock being undone and a female physician entered, looking simultaneously relieved and irritated at what she saw. 

“Oh, no one quite knows,” the Doctor answered with a shrug, ignoring the Time Lady as she fussed with the equipment. “Doesn’t help clear it up that he died at some point and that lot brought him back for the Time War.” He winced as the machine gave off a shrill sound that wasn’t doing his headache any favours. He leaned forward, elbows against his bent knees still under the thin sheets. “Blimey! Bit obnoxious, yeah?”

“Next time, don’t just start tugging at wires,” she snapped, flipping a switch that silenced the machine. 

“Why’d he arrest you though?” Rose asked. 

The Doctor’s expression darkened and he turned to the physician, finding her gaze snapping back from where it had been on Rose back to the equipment. Well someone didn’t want to be caught listening. “Don’t guess there’s a chance of gettin’ an audience with him, is there?” 

“The Lord President is indisposed. He left you in my care.” She squared her shoulders and her gaze shifted past him and to Rose. “He needs rest. We’ve never seen anything like this form of regeneration before. We don’t know his limits. If you need anything, this intercom will reach us.” She motioned to the panel she’d used to turn off the equipment, waited for Rose to nod, and turned on her heel to walk out the doors. They gave a soft, audible click behind her after they’d shut. 

“Not how I thought we’d be spendin’ the evening,” she grumbled.

The question died on the Doctor’s lips at the pointed look he found himself on the receiving end of. “Well, might I offer you the next best thing?”

“What’s that now?”

He tossed back the sheets, thankful to find that he was still dressed in his trousers, even if he was missing his shoes, jacket, and tie somewhere around the room. “A daring escape.” 

“You’ve been unconscious for hours.”

“But I’m fine now.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and his sock covered feet touched the cool floor beneath it. He pushed himself off the bed, holding his breath, and found himself… mostly steady. Steadyish. Steady enough. “See? Right as rain.”

She lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “Do we need to be escaping?”

“Oh yeah.”

“But he knows you’re not who he thought you were.”

“Oh, I doubt he’s given us much more thought other than how to keep us preoccupied. Didn’t help I was flat on my back for… however long. Sorry ‘bout that. Where’d you leave the TARDIS?”

“It was in a big green room.”

“Council chambers. Brilliant. They’ll have had to physically move it down to the bay to try to pry it open. Good news is that coming from another universe they won’t have the override codes and she’ll keep ‘em out for a bit. Buy us some time.” He was up now, having found his jacket and tie - shoving the latter in his pocket to deal with later - but not his shoes. He tossed the jacket back on the bed as he dropped to his knees to search for it. 

Rose cleared her throat and he looked back and up, finding his trainers under the same chair she’d been sitting in. He flashed her a smile and she shook her head, her own amusement leaking through. “You gonna fill me in on why he wants the TARDIS?”

He sat on the floor to tug his shoes on. “Oh, I imagine they’re looking for a way to track the Doctor of this universe. If he’s anything like me, he’d have found a way to turn the recall off first time they dragged him back here without warning. That’s off the table, but if they use our TARDIS -“

“Our?” Rose asked slyly. 

“Never get tired of that, do you?”

“Nope!”  She extended a hand down to him as he finished tying the laces on his right shoe and took it, popping to his feet and offering a wink. “So they’re going to use the readouts on our TARDIS to bypass any safeties he has, huh?”

“They’ll try. Have to get inside first.” He shrugged on his jacket, patting his pocket to find it empty. 

“Looking for this?” Rose asked, holding his sonic screwdriver up with a grin. “Thought they might try to take it off ya.”

His smile grew to match hers. “Clever girl,” he praised and took the sonic to the door, readjusting the settings several times.

“Do you really think he’s behind all the tears between worlds?” 

Well, Rassilon had filled her in on some of it. Interesting. 

There was an audible click from the lock.

“That’s what we’re gonna find out.”  He held a hand out. “Ready?”

“Always.” She took it and they were off. 

——

Rose hadn’t memorised where they were going when they’d brought the Doctor back to the medical area. She’d been a bit preoccupied between watching his hitched breathing and the unknown people that surrounded them that she had had to rely on to help him. No one had introduced themselves. No one had bothered to acknowledge her after the man the Doctor called Rassilon had spoken to her. She was just the strange little alien girl to them. It had likely worked out in her favour,  no matter how frustrating it had been. It had let her snag his sonic and had allowed her to stay by his side without any fuss as long as she gave the medic that had been looking after him room to work. 

Thankfully the Doctor seemed to know where he was going, or at the very least he was acting like he did. She hadn’t run like this in a while, her hand fit perfectly into his and following behind as they moved through the strangely empty, windowless halls. 

They came to a corner and the Doctor slammed to a stop, motioning like he expected someone to be just around the corner. From running to creeping silently forward, he didn’t release her and she followed right behind as he risked a look around the blind corner. “That’s not right,” he muttered, moving so that he stood fully in the side hallway. 

“Are we lost?”

“No. Well, mostly not. Should have run into someone by now though.”

“I take it we’re not just lucky?”

“Not sure.” He was on the move again and she watched him grow more and more agitated with each empty hall. They wove what Rose hoped was outward, though the further they walked, the more uneasy she felt. Like the chamber she’d arrived in, everything was built on a grand scale. A grand scale with no one to fill it. She tightened her hold on his hand. 

“If it’s built the same way our Citadel in our universe was, we should have a sky bridge that leads us to the maintenance bay right past —“ He slammed directly into the doors he’d clearly thought would slide open for him. He shook it off, shooting it a skeptical look, and pulled out his sonic to start working on the control panel. 

“I’m just gonna ask it,” Rose said after a minute.

“Please don’t.”

The request startled her and she leaned against the wall, giving her a quick view of where he was crouched down as well as the long and empty hallway.  “But it’s all wrong, isn’t it? It feels all wrong.”

He made a non-committed sound and gave the panel a hard smack with the palm of his hand and the door slid open. Hot wind gushed in and somewhere in the distance Rose could hear an alarm sounding. She turned, a strange dread filling her up as she peered through the now-open doorway. It was bright and warm. She squinted, seeing two suns, one dipped lower in the sky than the other. They lit the sky in fiery tones of red and orange. They were beautiful, but as Rose turned her gaze down, she saw the destruction.

The door might have led to a skybridge once. If she squinted she could imagine the domed glass that simultaneously protected the pedestrians from the outside elements and provided a view that was must have been beautiful once. She wondered, for just a moment, what kind of wildlife Gallifrey had. If the Doctor had run through those hills below as a little boy or played in the trees there. Was his childhood home amongst one of the ruins that she looked down on now from the open door? The crumbling towers that looked like they’d been bombed, half fallen into cracks in the earth that had swallowed some up whole. Everything below them was quiet. Abandoned. The fields were burnt and the trees looked like metal put through fire. She swallowed hard, looking up. The glass itself was only partially shattered, sharp edges still hanging jaggedly from the beams that had once supported the windows. The stone floors must have been what saved portions of it, but the hall was mostly blown away as well, leaving only a narrow and often unsteady looking path right next to the interior wall. Between it and where the glass would have met was a sheer drop down that would kill them both. 

Rose risked a look at her Doctor who had come to stand with her at some point. He stared down at the wreckage with his expression somewhere between fury and unbearable sorrow. Her heart ached for him and she reached out, fingers softly touching his and startling him out of whatever dark thought he’d been drowning in. “Hey. Let’s find another way.”

He glanced back at the alarm that was still sounding, tilting his head to the side as if he might hear something she could not. All at once, he snatched up her hand and started forward. “Stay directly behind me. Not a step out of place.”

Footsteps finally began to echo in the distance and she realised what he must have already known: there was no other way. Not one that didn’t land them in some sort of holding cell or worse. Rose gave a sharp nod and followed him forward. 

The hot breeze whipped around them and he took the first step out. He paused, shifting his weight, and then continued forward. Rose followed behind, careful to watch his feet and take note that he was avoiding all of the cracks in the masonry. Each step of his was steady, even when he gave a short jump over a particularly crumbly part of the walkway. Well, short for him and his long legs. Rose sized it up as she heard shouting behind her. 

The Doctor turned around when he realized she wasn’t right with him and reached a hand out. “C’mon!”

Rose pulled in a deep breath. She’d been to the furthest edges of the universe and crossed dimensions to find this man. A little hop over a several hundred foot drop was nothing. 

“Halt!” a guard yelled behind her and Rose could feel the shaky ground beneath her shift as they added their weight. She held that deep brown gaze that she knew so well as she jumped.

His hand grabbed hers and she felt her right boot land. Then she felt the stone beneath it give way. The walkway dropped out from under her and she followed, her own startled cry choked off by the sudden drop. The Doctor’s fingers tightened around her wrist and she felt herself slam to a stop. Then swing. Then dangle. She risked a look up because she didn’t dare risk a look down. He was seated now, struggling to keep himself tumbling after her with the momentum in her direction.  “Doctor!”

“I’ve got you,” he promised, his own sneakers slipping against the stone as he leaned back, desperate, but he got one foot wedged against a protruding piece of the walkway to brace himself. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he muttered, and she wasn’t quite sure if he was talking to himself or her, but he shifted and finally met her eyes again. “Grab my hand with both.”

As she did, part of her mind flashed back to that goofy smile he always got when he talked about losing it. Or gaining it, maybe, in his case. Regeneration really did make it hard to keep track. 

“Somethin’ funny?” he asked in a strained voice as he started to pull.

“Love that hand,” she teased and, despite the fact that she was dangling over a several hundred foot drop, he gave her that grin she loved. They worked together and Rose clambered over the edge and halfway landed in his lap as she fell onto somewhat solid ground on the other side of the crumbling walkway. “And the man attached to it.”

“Stay right where you are!” the guard called from the other side, though he hardly looked intimidating with the distance he was keeping from the ledge.

“Right. Time to go,” the Doctor told her and hopped to his feet, offering her the same hand to help her up. She took it and they started forward, but a couple of steps in he slammed to a stop, turned to look at her as if he’d forgotten something very important, and said, “And I love you, Rose Tyler.”

And then they were off. Running away from a handful of Gallifreyan guards into the ruins of the city she was sure held a deep connection for him. But he had hold of her hand and she wouldn’t dare let go of it.

---

She’d been right in that the whole Citadel felt wrong . Part of it was the emptiness of the halls, the ruins of the city and fields that surrounded it. He’d known on an intellectual level what releasing the Moment had done, but seeing it unfold in fractured pieces of reality was like being caught in a time loop and being forced to watch it happen again and again and again. He remembered the days, weeks, and years that followed it in his own timestream. The dispair and the regret. It hung heavy in the air with every breath he drew in in this place, and he wondered if that too was leaking through the fractures or he was just reminded of his own necessary sins.

But that was only part of it. The other part wasn’t quite as easy to catch ahold of. Sometimes he thought he ran so fast that he ran right past what should be staring him in the face. It wasn’t until they hit the maintenance bay and found it almost as empty as those halls had been, the TARDIS sitting out in the open, that he knew.

The guards had been for show. They hadn’t been faster than the few available guards, they’d been given a clear path with a few play actors to keep them from being too suspicious. 

“The one thing you can count on the Doctor for: a ruckus,” a voice echoed in the bay and Darkel stepped out of the shadows to stand between the Doctor and the TARDIS. “From this world or another.”

He turned back the way they had come to see her partner in chase - Chalmirraflexon - coming up from behind. Rose squeezed his hand before reluctantly releasing in, ready for whatever came next. It was moments like this that he was reminded of everything she’d been through, everything that she’d been forced to become, just to find him. She’d learn to fight and she’d learned to survive. He touched her hand subtly, the unspoken plea of wait causing her to relax the stance only slightly.

“You can’t get in,” the Doctor said as he looked between the two of them. “And you need my TARDIS to find his.”

Chalmirraflexon took a step closer, the movement conveying the underlying threat. 

“We have no interest in harming you,” Rassilon’s voice echoed from the bay, drawing part of his attention back that way. “You’ve seen what the Moment has done. What it is doing. What it will do. You swore an oath once to protect Gallifrey.”

“You saw what happened in our universe. The only difference is a glitch in this one,” the Doctor answered, his voice rougher than he expected with all the old anger that came with those dark memories. He watched Rassilon carefully, the ancient Time Lord’s stoic expression cracking only slightly at that. What in all the worlds had he expected? He saw it. He knew. The man he’d been during the war was hardly different than the man they were desperate to chase down. “I won’t help you kill him,” he said firmly. “There’s been enough death in all of this.”

“And if the Moment remains open, there will be more,” Darkel chimed in. 

“Then I’ll close it.” He could feel Rose’s eyes on him from behind and oh he wished she’d watch the threat on her left.

“They’ll try to stop you.”

“They?” Rose asked and Darkel glared at her with the same disdain that so many Time Lords had for what they deemed to be lesser species. 

Rassilon, strangely, did not. Oh, he looked at her, but there was none of the irritation the Doctor would have expected there. “He’s not working alone.”

“That’s my problem to solve,” the Doctor answered, wondering what familiar face from his past he might see. In his own time, he’d been alone by choice, drowning in his own regret and pain and loneliness and feeling that he deserved every second of it. He wasn’t sure who this Doctor had aligned himself with, but it didn’t change anything. “Those are my terms, Rassilon, and the ones you'll have to agree to if you have any hope of using our TARDIS to track down his. Even if you pry the door open, she’ll never fly for you. You need us.” He looked back at Rose. “Both of us.”

There was a beat of silence as the demand hung in the air. If Rassilon denied it, this was going to turn into a scuffle and he really wanted to avoid that. 

“You’re running out of time,” Rose said, her voice steady and determined, despite the ancient creature she was staring down. Of course it was. “We saw what it’s doing and if Gallifrey’s ground zero, whatcha gonna do when somethin’ opens and swallows you whole?”

Rassilon pushed a frustrated breath out through his nose, as his gaze swerved to focus on them. Finally, he nodded. “Close it, Doctor, and we will handle the rest.”

“No. You’ll leave him to me. That’s non negotiable.”

“Very well,” he ground out and took a symbolic step aside. 

Behind Rose, Chalmirraflexon also stood down. She came to stand next to the Doctor and, together, they moved through the bay, and in an impulsive moment, he snapped his fingers and the doors to the TARDIS - the same that he knew they’d been struggling to open -  flew open with ease. Straight backed, squared shouldered, they entered, those same doors shutting behind them and leaving them alone inside. 

“Don’t think we’re not talkin’ ‘bout that --” she started, already moving to the opposite side of the console as he was hopping to.

“-- but he’s not going to just let us handle it,” the Doctor answered the question she hadn’t had a chance to ask yet. He pulled the lever that sent them flying away. “First thing’s first!”

“Where’re we going?”

“Anywhere but here. We’ll break out, do a quick scan-sy on the ol’ girl and --” A violent shudder interrupted him. 

“I’m all for a good sci-fi bit, but I swear if they’ve picked us up in some sorta tracker beam…”

An alarm screeched out.

“No, it’s just…. Nope.” Well that definitely hadn’t been the right move. He jumped to another control. “No, not that. If I just --” 

Another shudder. Then another. Then a jolt and he heard Rose swallow a scream as she tumbled from her feet. He landed hard on the other side of the main console, rolling to pop back up to his feet in a practiced motion as the ship smoked around him. His hands flew across the buttons and the levers, working and adjusting as he made his way around. “Rose, pull that --” He stopped abruptly as he stood from his bent position to find himself face to face with someone that was very much not Rose Tyler.

And as he stared, he realized what Rassilon had said: If he had laid a trap. Not the other Doctor. Not him. Rassilon had been talking about the Time lord in front of him, the one that they hadn’t dared name that had somehow aligned himself with the other Doctor. Slowly, the startled look that he wore at having been thrust into another TARDIS without warning melted into a vicious smirk as the Doctor breathed his name: “Master.”

Chapter Text

 One moment she’d been standing there, then the next she was falling back with the momentum. She’d had her footing, though, she knew she had, but then it was like the grated floor of the TARDIS had just disappeared from under her boot and reappeared just in time for her to land hard on her bum, the startled cry she’d given following her down as she blinked hard at her surroundings.

This was not their TARDIS. A TARDIS, maybe, but not the one that she’d become so intimately familiar with after having traveled with her Doctor and then helped him to rebuild it in this world. This one was old and grimy, like it’d seen battle close-up and only barely scraped by to the other side of it. The panel was smoking, but the man that seemed to be piloting it stopped in his tracks, his dark eyes coming to focus on her. “Hello there. Where’d you come from?”

Rose stared at him. The man in front of her looked older with his grey-white hair and the deep lines in his face that seemed to show every worry, every failure from a war that she knew had taken a toll he could never explain fully to her. He didn’t look like the man she loved or even like the man she’d first fallen for, but somehow, deep in her soul, Rose knew that he was the Doctor. Maybe not her Doctor, but this universe’s Doctor. This was the version of him he hated to talk about.

“Are you hurt, young lady?” he asked and Rose blinked up at him, realising for the first time that she was still sitting and staring at him slack-jawed. 

“No. Nope. Just fine,” she managed, picking herself up and dusting herself off a little. She looked around the control room. “I just didn’t think it’d be this fast. Or like this…but you’re the Doctor, aren’t you?”

His eyes narrowed a little, but he didn’t whip out a sonic screwdriver or even take a step back from her. Instead he studied her with a measured calm. “Well, he’s recruiting them younger and younger, isn’t he? You don’t look a day over two hundred and fifty.”

“Hey!” Rose protested before it registered what he meant. “I’m not a Time Lord. I’m Human.”

That seemed to pique his interest even more. “Human? Then how the blazes did you end up on my TARDIS?”

“One second I was on ours, then everything started to go a bit crazy, then I’m here.”

“Ours?” Finally he reached into his inner pocket and pulled a familiar-looking sonic screwdriver and gave her a quick scan. He looked at the readouts, frowned, and looked to be working through trying to figure out exactly how much to trust her. At least he had confirmation she was Human now.

“Listen, I know that guy’s after you. Ras-somethin’.”

“Rassilon.”

“That’s him.” She frowned, sorting through her story to find the most direct, simplest version that still wasn’t so wild that it could be believed. Granted, if this really was this universe’s Doctor, then he kept an open mind. And she had just randomly appeared in his TARDIS. “Very long, very long and wind-y story short: I’m from a parallel universe, I traveled with the Doctor, and he --” no reason to go into the whole metacrisis thing if she didn’t have to and have to deal with any trouble that might bring them -- “and I got trapped here through a whole bunch of events. Made a life, but that Rassilon guy had him arrested thinkin’ he was you.”

She watched him take in the quickly explained story, his gaze darting around the console room as if he didn’t trust that she was the only one there. Or looking for someone. Rassilon had said he was working with someone else. Who knew where that person was hiding. She couldn’t possibly be lucky enough for it to be a companion she knew like Sara Jane or Donna from this universe. Though maybe he hadn’t even met Donna yet… He should have met Sara Jane though, right? Or any number of the laundry list of companions the Doctor had befriended over the years and had gone on adventures through time and space with.

“It would have been easy enough for Rassilon to confirm your friend’s story,” this Doctor that looked so much more war-torn than her own said. 

“Yeah. That was a trip.”

He tilted his head a little like it took him a moment to place the phrase.  “So he commandeered his TARDIS.”

“Our TARDIS,” Rose corrected and he lifted a grey eyebrow like he didn’t truly believe she could comprehend what she was saying. 

Even so, he didn’t argue her point. “Very well, then… that explains both how you got here and why you’re Human, but not  --”

“Did the TARDISes… I dunno, cross streams or somethin’?”

“Did they what ?” he demanded, and there he was. He was wearing a different face and was a different Doctor than her own, but she saw that expression she knew so well when he was dragged out of mid-stream-of-conscious by a question. Usually clueing in on it a minute or so after the actual question had been asked. This War Doctor was a little more focused than her own.

“My Doctor thought they wanted our TARDIS to help track yours, but s’far as I know he didn’t expect one of us to get tossed from one to the other like that. And why me? You’d think there’d be… oh I don’t know. An equal exchange or something.” That sounded right. She wasn’t sure it was, but it sounded right.

And from the expression that dawned across the War Doctor’s face, maybe it was. He turned suddenly and she thought that might have been the first time that he fully took his eyes off of her. His dark gaze swept the console room rather than just looking to its corners every spare chance he got. When he found the rest of it empty, that gaze that was somehow strangely younger than her own Doctor’s fell back on her. “You're clever. I see why he likes you.”

“Okay… so was there someone else in here?” If she were lucky, he’d offer up the information without making her dig too much for it. 

“Yes. Someone I imagine your Doctor knows well, though I don’t know if he’ll know the face he’s wearing these days. We just barely escaped with our lives from our last run-in with Rassilon. My friend was injured. Dying.”

“He regenerated,” Rose said softly, receiving a nod of approval. “Yeah, I’ve seen it.”

“Bit jarring for a Human, I know.”

“More than a bit.”

“For what it’s worth, it’s jarring for us as well. It’s a bit of a dodgy process --” Rose tried not to react to the familiar words spoken with an entirely different voice -- “and it’s new. We had to stop our search to give him time. You’re here, there’s a good chance he’s there.”

“Okay. Right. Is my Doctor in danger?”

He started to answer and stopped, his expression strained as if he were weighing two absolutely conflicting options and wasn’t sure which was the truth. “I don’t know. We should probably find your Doctor.” He circled the console to the phone that Rose had seen used only a handful of times before being dropped into Pete’s World, but his fingers hovered over it without quite touching. She watched as his grey brows drew together, the lines between them deepening, and his lips twitched downward. 

“What?”

Then he looked at her, his gaze studying her closely. “I almost missed it.”

“Missed what?” 

His eyes narrowed just a little more so that he was almost squinting at her now and a low, thoughtful hum left him. “I’m not sure yet. But it’s there… just out of reach.”

Rose chewed on the inside of her lip, working her way between pushing him to contact her Doctor and letting him follow whatever trail he was on to the end in case it led to an answer they needed as she’d seen happen so many times before.

“Ah,” he said after a long moment. “Right. Your name. You know mine, but I don’t know yours.”

Or maybe it was just one of those moments where he’d managed to hop back to a thought that he’d blown past earlier. Some things never changed. A soft, amused sound left her as she smiled. Well, it wasn’t like she’d be spoiling his future anyway. “Rose. Rose Tyler.”

She had expected him to take the name and continue on, but instead he continued to stare for another beat moment. Finally he gave a brief, terse nod, and picked up the phone without any further explanation. 

----

The Doctor took an involuntary step backward as the Master - wearing the same face as the Master he’d last known that had stolen his TARDIS, ran for Prime Minister in early 21st Century London just to subjugate the whole world,  and tortured Marth Jones’ family - took a step forward, his eyes blazing like he was ready to launch himself violently forward. He only made it half a step, though, before his knee buckled under him and he dropped to the floor, bent over with an arm wrapped tightly around his midsection. He remained there for a long moment before the Doctor saw a wisp of gold escape from his parted lips. 

“You’re new,” the Doctor breathed. “Freshly regenerated.”

The Master looked up at that, a snarl leaving him and the Doctor held his hands out, palms outward. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he swore. “I’m here to help.”

“I know the type of help Rassilon sends.”

“You don’t exactly have a stellar record yourself,” the Doctor grumbled softly, taking a knee to get on his best enemy’s level. “Look at me.” He waited until the pained brown gaze flickered up to do just that. “Look close.”

There was a beat as the Master studied him, then another. “Impossible.”

“I’m from a parallel dimension. Lot like this one, except the Moment destroyed all but you and me.”

“How’s that?”

“You were at the end of the universe.”

“And you, Doctor?”

The Doctor’s lips parted to answer, but he had trouble forming the words. The admission. He pursed them back together before trying again, but the Master beat him to it. Apparently it didn’t matter what universe they were in, he always knew.

“Look at you. The man that made people better,” he sneered. “The War took that from you, didn’t it?”

The words cut, just as they were meant to, but they also served as a reminder of what was at stake around them. “Rassilon wants to kill him. Likely you as well. Let me help you.”

The Master hummed softly to himself, rocking forward so that he was suddenly much closer than he had been before, his gaze so intense that it was as if he were trying to look through him rather than at him. He drew in a deep breath through his nose and the Doctor, as subtly as he could, shifted his hand to the floor beneath him in case he needed to make a speedy exit. The Master’s lips tightened into a dangerous smile. “I can practically smell the fear on you, Doctor. Worried I’m up to no good?”

Oddly enough, he felt himself relax a bit at that. “Always.”

“Some things never change.” He sat back now, looking less consumed by the regeneration process, at least for the moment. “Like you and your pets. Who’s Rose, I wonder? Another Human stray you picked up?”

The Doctor unfolded himself from the floor and moved to the controls that were still simmering from the partial collision within the Time Vortex. The two TARDISes hadn’t merged like had happened in the past, but instead there’d been an exchange. Likely due to a whole slew of factors including two Doctors from two different dimensions and the cracks shattering this universe in slow motion that had allowed it, even with his shields up. It would have been an equal exchange. Rose for the Master, meaning she was with him. The Doctor that had been forged in the Time War. He needed to get to her, but he couldn’t do that until he’d done a full sweep for trackers that he knew were attached to follow him to the War Doctor and the Master. Not that he had time for that. 

Shortcut it was.

 He popped the heel of his hand against a red button and watched the display show the outside of the TARDIS light up like a Christmas tree, the defences rendering anything that wasn’t part of her attached to the outer shell useless. At least five devices dropped off into the vortex. 

Satisfied with that, he moved to the telephone that was already ringing by the time he had a hand on it. He put the receiver to his ear. “I believe you have someone of mine,” he said by way of greeting.

“ And you of mine ,” came a gruff voice over the receiver that he had never actually heard from the outside. Well wasn’t that odd? “ Are they following you? ”

“Not anymore.”

“ Well, she may just be right then .”

“She’s --?” The Doctor swallowed hard, finding it almost impossible to verify that Rose was, in fact, safe for the moment.

“ Quite alright. I’d appreciate if you’d watch over our old friend for me. If you are as she says, you know how he gets. Bit testy at times, but to leave him where he was would have signed his death warrant .”

“You have enough of that, I imagine,” the Doctor snapped before he could stop himself. 

There was a pause and a crackling over the line. “ Yes ,” the War Doctor said at last. “ I’ll send coordinates for a place to meet .” The line went dead then and the Doctor kicked himself. He should have asked to hear her voice. Should have demanded proof she was, as he said, quite alright. He hadn’t, though, so all he had was the word of a man that had wiped out two ancient races with the push of a button. 

“It’s like you think you’re not him,” the Master said from where he’d come to lean against the railing surrounding the console. He was looking a little steadier than he had a few moments before, but no less interested in absolutely every subtle twitch in the Doctor’s expression that he could observe and use against him at a later time. “But you’ve been him.”

“I’ll never be him again.”

“You keep telling yourself that,” the Master chuckled. “They’ll hunt you just as devotedly as they hunt him. And your little companion? What of her? Choices make us what we are, don’t they, Doctor?”

“And you, Master? What choices led you here rather than to the end of time?”

The Master, predictably, didn’t answer, but continued to stare unnervingly at him. 

The Doctor pushed a frustrated breath out through his nose and looked to the screens, willing the coordinates that had been promised through. The sooner he was back with Rose and could confirm that she was safe, the sooner they could find a way out of this. Just because he wasn’t willing to let Rassilon kill the other Doctor and the Master didn’t mean that he trusted either one of them. They just had to ---

“Ah-ha!” he breathed as he saw the coordinates flash across the screen. He pulled the appropriate lever as he shouted: “Allons-y!” and they shifted directions towards their new destination.

-----

He was quieter. More reserved, and maybe even a little more focused. If she didn’t know him like she did, she would have said this version of him was more weighed down, but she knew her Doctor carried all that this one did - or at least a large portion of it - on his shoulders. He just hid it better as time passed. 

He’d told her once that it’d been a little over fifty years between the end of the Last Great Time War and when he’d met her, and for any Human that was over half a lifetime, but for a Time Lord that was already centuries old, that was just a little bit more than nothing. Definitely less than he’d needed to come to terms with what he’d done to - as far as Rose knew - save the universe from a war that had almost destroyed it. Sometimes he seemed to feel that way, sometimes not, but he never wanted to talk about it, which matched up with the Time Lord that was manning the controls of the TARDIS in front of her as she sat off to the side and watched. He was solemn. Reserved. Understated in a way that reminded her of a few people she'd known back in her days working in a shop where they’d just sort of drift… no real love for life. No real attachment. It was as if he were trying to make it from one landing spot to the next without drowning beneath the weight of the previous one between. It wasn’t quite what she’d seen in his eyes when Rose had first met her Doctor, but not nearly as far off as the man she knew now. This was the man that had sacrificed his home to save the galaxy and had borne the weight of it. 

“You can ask.”

The voice pulled her out of her thoughts and Rose looked over to where the War Doctor was moving from one panel to the next to bring them into landing. “I don’t want to pry.”

“So he hasn’t told you anything,” he mused, those dark eyes shifting to look at her in a way that felt like part question, part challenge.

“Enough,” Rose answered non committedly.

A rough, throaty chuckle left him. “Then not much at all.”

She tried to look confident and thought she must have failed for the amused look that touched his face. 

“I never thought I’d survive it, opening the Moment, so I have a hard time imagining what my future self will do with the fact that I did.”

“He’s not --”

“Yes, yes. I understand that. But I imagine something similar happened in your own world. Something like a Time War is too large to differ dramatically from universe to universe. If he chose to fight or was dragged kicking and screaming as I was, there are two ways it will always end: either the war destroys all of time and space or I make an impossible choice.”

“Or some superweapon gets jarred halfway and cracks open the universe,” Rose murmured, regretting it as soon as she had. Her Doctor had made the impossible decision and it worked, but this one…

I didn’t know it could be worse. 

His horrified words echoed in her mind and she remembered the haunted expression played out on his face. He regretted what he felt like he had to do to protect the universe as a whole, but it had been contained. And it had worked. With the warring parties wiped out, the rest of the universe had gone on living. Not here, though. Not only had he made the move to sacrifice his own people, but it hadn’t worked. It was still killing everyone. It would, given time, destroy everything. 

Rose watched as the War Doctor scuttled across the bridge of the TARDIS, busying himself with this and that and anything other than her statement. “You didn’t do what Rassilon thinks you did, did you?” He paused, but didn’t look over to where she was seated. “He thinks you hid that Moment thing. That you’re doing this on purpose.”

“Hardly,” the War Doctor huffed. 

“There’s got to be some reason, though… something different here from our world that kept it from working. Why’s it ripping everythin’ apart here?”

His gaze flickered to her briefly. “That is the question I hope to find a solution for.”

“Why’d you do it?” she found herself asking after a long moment of silence, the one question she’d never dared to ask her own Doctor tumbling from her lips before she’d realised she was asking it.

“Come again?”

“Why’d you open the Moment?”

“To end the War.”

“Right, but you had to know it’d destroy Gallifrey along with the Daleks.”

He turned and looked fully at her now and Rose had never felt so young.  Even in his most frustrated moments when he’d exploded with some overblown statement about humanity on whole or another, no look that her Doctor had ever leveled at her had made her feel so absolutely and utterly ignorant. “You said I could ask,” she squeaked before she could stop herself.

The War Doctor looked away, his voice gruff when he spoke. “All of time and space was at stake. And still is, as you pointed out earlier.”

Rose cringed at that. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just… my Doctor tends to find a way around things. Not always, but for the most part - if there’s any hope - he finds it. He finds another way.”

“Perhaps your Doctor is a better man than I,” the War Doctor murmured.

“We can help you find it. Help you close it and, maybe, Gallifrey won’t have to be destroyed here.” She knew how idealistic it sounded, especially faced with the odds they were staring down, but she couldn’t help but hope. She’d seen her Doctor save everyone enough times that she knew it wasn’t completely impossible, no matter how much damage had been done.

The War Doctor didn’t answer, instead leaned in to observe a read out from a monitor and Rose shifted where she was to try to get an angle on it. Numbers and symbols scrolled across the screen, but he seemed to be satisfied by them and pulled a lever. The TARDIS gave a soft wheezing as it pulsed in and out, bringing them in for a landing. Once they set down, he pressed a button to release the doors.

They swung open to a jungle planet and Rose followed him out into it, feeling the muggy heaviness settle on her as soon as she passed through the short barrier that surrounded the Time Lord’s ship. It was suffocating, but she still managed to suck a breath in and smile through it as she saw a much more familiar man duck through the shrubbery. 

The Doctor’s face lit up when he saw her and he sprinted forward. Rose found herself running as well and launched herself into his arms when she met him, her nose buried in the nape of his neck and she felt her feet leave the soft dirt as he lifted her up, his own arms tight around her midsection and his lips touching the side of her face. “You alright?” he whispered.

She snorted a laugh. “He’s not so bad.”

He set her down and his expression was tighter than she’d expected, positioning himself between his alternative self and, also, the blond man that was following up behind him.

This was the first glance she had at the man she felt like she should know more about than she actually did. Blond, dark eyes, and an absolute lunatic’s smile, he sauntered out to the middle and stood looking between the two Doctor’s before his gaze fell on her. “Oh. She’s cute. Should I be offended?”

Her Doctor rolled his eyes at the antics and Rose pursed her lips, holding back the amused smile at his reaction. She inched just a little closer, her fingers touching his and she felt him relax ever so slightly. 

The blond Time Lord’s grin only grew and he too took a step closer, his attention solely on them rather than the War Doctor. “You must be Rose. You may call me the Master.” 

All attempts to keep a steady expression failed as Rose couldn’t help the choked laugh that escaped her. “Bit of an ego on this one, yeah?”

The response didn’t seem to phase him as his gaze swiveled back to her Doctor. “I like her. She’s got spunk.”

“You’re younger than I expected,” the War Doctor sighed, cutting into the chaos the so-called Master seemed to be trying to flame.

For his part, Rose’s Doctor looked mildly relieved at the distraction. “A lot happened just after the Time War in our world.”

“Which brings you here. Right back to the center of it.”

“Yes. I’d like to help you.”

“I fear I’m beyond help now.”

Her Doctor took a step forward, though didn’t let go of her hand. “It doesn’t have to end like it did on my world.”

“Your friend and I were discussing that just now,” the War Doctor mused with a glance at Rose. “What difference could cause such drastically different outcomes?”

“Him, for starters,” the Master said with a shrug and Rose risked a quick glance at her Doctor to see his reaction. They didn’t talk about it anymore. There wasn’t any need. The fact that the metacrisis had left him with one heart and no regenerations hadn’t really weighed on their day-to-day existence after he got used to the difference. The life he lived, the way he thought, the way he acted was her Doctor, so no one that knew him really could tell the difference and the subject had been dropped over their time in Pete’s World. No one but this one Time Lord. Somehow, the Master had clocked him almost immediately.

The blond Time Lord flashed a devilish grin. “Oh, pick your jaws up off the floor. Did you think I’d miss it? You --” he tapped the Doctor’s nose, suddenly right in his face without warning -- “have one heart. Listen to that. Can you hear it, Doctor? Only a double beat. Bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum.” He tapped his chest with each bum-bum as if for emphasis until the Doctor snatched him by the wrist.

“Stop it.”

“Hit a nerve?”

“Enough.”

“I don’t think it is.” He tipped up just a little on his toes so that he was eye to eye with the taller Time Lord. “You pop out of nowhere with Rassilon on our tail and you -- impossible you -- want us to trust you and your little girlfriend.”

“Distrust is rich coming from you.” 

The War Doctor had said that the Master knew the Doctor well, but there was something deeper there. Something… very old in the layers familiarity. Even after everything, it was easy to forget just how long her Doctor had lived and how little she knew about all of those centuries. He’d answer questions if she asked, but she didn’t even know where to start with over nine hundred years of history. This man, though… he was certainly at the center of it, and he knew all the right buttons to push, even when he shouldn’t have any way to.

Rose loosed a loud sigh, effectively breaking the stalemate. “He’s not the difference. That happened after the Time War.”

“So it happened , did it?” the Master asked, amusement rolling off him in waves and the Doctor finally released him. Rose didn’t miss the fact that the other Time Lord rubbed at his wrist gingerly, even if he’d gotten a piece of information that he’d been clawing after.

“He’s right,” the War Doctor broke in. “That’s enough, Master. I may not know exactly why you want to be involved with all of this, but both he and I know it’s not to help end the destruction.”

The Master feigned a hurt expression. “You never trust me when I’m actually here to help,” he pouted.

“When’s that ever been?” both Doctor’s demanded in sync and the Master took a step back with his hands raised.

The War Doctor sighed, sounding very tired and very done with it all. “Clearly this is not something I’ve been able to resolve alone. If you can help --”

“Yes,” the Doctor answered and Rose could see the relief in his eyes. 

The War Doctor looked over to the Master as if daring him to argue. The other Time Lord simply shrugged, settling himself down on a fallen tree and making a show of zipping his lips. “Right. Then let’s get started.”

-----

His other self had picked a good place to meet. While the Doctor didn’t know this planet personally - he’d wracked his brain over it and, for the life of him, couldn’t recall ever seeing it in any database. Was it possible that Pete’s World not only had small differences from their own, but ones the size of literal planets? - it turned out that the overgrowth of the jungle provided a natural damper to any tracking devices. It wasn’t a complete shield, but it gave them time to compare notes.

The War Doctor walked them through what had happened, from the gut wrenching choice that the Doctor remembered making for himself to how it’d all gone wrong. That’s where it all seemed to splinter, quite literally, as it turned out. The War Doctor described in halted, pained detail how he’d pushed the big, red button, the galaxy eater that was supposedly sentient never whispering a word to him as the world exploded around him. It had been a bright flash like lightning - “I know now why they called me what they did,” he’d huffed mirthlessly. “The Oncoming Storm indeed.” - that had thrown him back so hard that it’d knocked the breath from him when he hit the ground. As he’d rolled to his knees to force himself to watch the destruction unfold, he saw only the barn he’d gone into to release that destruction. The Moment was gone. There was no judgment from it, no words of wisdom or warning. It was just… gone.

“And then the universe began to fracture,” the War Doctor said, the look in his eyes haunted. “If we thought the Time War was harming the worlds, this was swallowing them up. The Daleks were scattered, it’s true, but the cost has been too high. I meant to give my life to protect those that had part in this war, yet I doomed them all in trying.”

The Doctor felt Rose shift at his side, glancing over to see her expression strained. In the moment of confession, she wasn’t judging, but her own compassion rolled off her in waves and he could tell she wanted to reach out to the Doctor she hadn’t known until just a few hours before. Instead, she scooted closer to him to lean in just a little. Oh. She was comforting him . He hadn’t realized he was wearing his own past so clearly on his face.

He cleared his throat. “How do you know it’s jarred open?”

“What stories did your world have of it?” the War Doctor asked in response.

“They called it the Galaxy Eater,” the Doctor answered. “It would burn a galaxy in a moment.” And it had. It’d certainly burned his.

“Yet it didn’t. Piece by piece, it’s chipped away at it. Opening doors and cracks and fractured destruction.”

“Like it’s been caught just out of time,” the Master said from his place where he’d looked very much like he’d been asleep, his back pressed against the fallen log and his chin touching his chest. He cracked a dark eye open. “Just a bit out of sync. Enough to let the destruction seep through in fits and starts.”

The Doctor bristled a little without meaning to. “And how’d you end up a part of this?”

The Master offered him a lazy, mocking smile and let his eyes drift closed again without answering the question. 

Next to him, Rose loosed a long breath out through her nose and wrapped her jacket a little tighter around her shoulders as she stood, her clever gaze fixed on the Doctor’s oldest friend. “Okay, you,” she said cheerfully. “Let’s have a chat.”

“Am I in trouble?” he asked, matching her tone.

“Something tells me you’re always in trouble. And I hear you know the Doctor well. Seeing as he was the last Time Lord in our world, he must have known you for a long time. I bet you have stories.”

The Master uncurled himself from his place, clearly amused by her choice of topic, and that smile stretched across his lips that made the Doctor uneasy. He started to stand, but Rose waved him back. “It’s alright. Isn’t it?”

He watched the other grin and set his jaw, determined to let it play out. She was clever and she was strong. She’d been strong enough to look into the Heart of the TARDIS and soak in the Time Vortex. She’d been strong enough to jump dimension after dimension, even entering one that only existed inside of Donna’s mind, all to find him. She was focused, and if he believed in anything, he believed in her. He settled back to his place to watch them disappear into the trees. 

“I don’t know which we should be more worried about,” the War Doctor mused roughly. 

“Oh, him. Definitely him.”

That pulled a chuckle from the other Doctor. “You may be right. He did help me, though, for whatever that is worth.” The Doctor shot him a look and his counterpart chuckled. “I know he’s playing his own angle for his own ends, but for now he’s on our side of things.”

“How did he help?”

The old, worn face tightened just a bit and the War Doctor’s lips twitched down. “He found me while I was searching for the Moment and he sifted my memories to see the flash of time that I couldn’t recall. Just as the crack opened and swallowed the Moment.”

“You let him in your head?”

“Oh, I know what doors to keep shut with him,” the War Doctor chuckled. “Comes with knowing him as we do. As I do, perhaps. The way you look at him….”

“He hurt a friend and her family. He… hurt everyone, and then he died. To spite me, I think.”

“That does sound like him, though I find he always manages to come back ‘round.”

Memories played out across his mind of all the times that had been true. He’d been dead before. Perhaps the Doctor that had taken Donna back would see him again, even if he didn’t.

“So he found it?” the Doctor asked, intentionally pulling himself back to the task at hand. 

“And Rassilon’s people found us. We had to lay low for the first few hours and let him rest. It was… not an easy transition.”

“They never are.”

“We were on our way to find it when the two TARDISes collided.”

“Then you have the location?”

“What I saw, yes. Best I can tell, it fell onto one of the moons of Melodion. The second and third always looked the same to me.”

“Oh yeah,” the Doctor hummed with a smile at the thought. “Good ol’ Moons of Melodion! You wanna talk about competition. They pushed innovation forward in the 112th century though. You never knew what new technology’d come outta that corner of the universe.”

“Indeed. I fed the image into the TARDIS and we were aiming for around 11,150 or so. I suppose we should get to it.”

The brush rustling behind them drew both of their attentions, as did the laughter that came with it. The Master and Rose exited the corner they’d stepped off to in order to let the two Doctors work out what happened next, but there was something in that laughter that reminded the Doctor of when he’d walked in on Rose and Sarah Jane giggling at his expense. Uh oh.

“Now what?” the War Doctor groused.

“Oh, nothing much,” Rose answered with a cheeky grin aimed at her Doctor. “Just a story about a time loop and a boy in your class that you had a row with. Don’t think I don’t want to hear that whole story when this is said and done.”

The Doctor snorted, not sure if he should be suspicious or grateful to the Master for sharing one of their milder pranks from over their mischievous youth. She was smiling, though, and he couldn’t help but echo it. “Rose Tyler, when we’re all done with this, I’ll tell you any story you like from the Academy.”

She moved to loop her arm through his. “I’m holding you to that, mister.”

“If you’re quite done,” the War Doctor cut in. 

“Right. To the Moons of Melodion we go!” And if they were very, very lucky, this would all be finished soon.

Chapter Text

The Third Moon of Melodion in the year 11,150 should have been at the height of its civilization with floating city levels scattered across the moon, each offset and rotating to make sure that the land below it was never permanently in shadow. Each city was dedicated to the newest technologies and ideas. The cleverest minds from all over the galaxy convened there and on its sister moon, the two in a sometimes-friendly race to the top. They pushed and they innovated, cultures coming together to add what Donna Noble would have called that spark of creativity along with the intelligence that so many cultures that had taken to the stars shared. There should have been bustling market places and entertainment, transportation and even a small shop selling t-shirts declaring that the visitor had been to the Third Moon of Melodion and all they brought back was a lousy t-shirt. The occasional Human that passed through would get a kick out of it and the Doctor had been so amused on his first visit that he’d walked away with three.

It should have all been there, but it wasn’t. Instead, as the Doctor and Rose stepped out from the TARDIS onto the rocky terrain - as opposed to the lush purple grass that had been engineered especially for a handful of animals that had been brought back from extinction from a distant world that they could no longer inhabit - with not a floating city in sight. Instead, there were only ruins that must have crashed down to the ground below, their sturdy structure keeping them somewhat intact, but the moon had not been so fortunate. It appeared as if the city platform had gone into freefall, all second, third, and twentieth failsafes failing it. It had slammed into the mountain below it, cracking the protruding land structure straight down to what had been plains beneath it. Though, if his hasty calculations were correct - and assuming that the city flew at the same distance above this moon as it did the one he’d visited in his own universe - then the crack went much, much deeper into the ground. The lack of vegetation and life where it had been bustling before certainly seemed to indicate that. 

“Well, this is a change,” the War Doctor mused as he and the Master made their way from his TARDIS. 

He was missing something. Something sitting right in front of him where he should see it, but he couldn’t quite…. Of course! The Doctor dropped into a crouch, sonic screwdriver in hand and sweeping the cracked direct at his feet. Just as he thought. “This damage is centuries old. How long have you been searching for the Moment?”

“Half a century. Little more, perhaps.”

“What are you thinking?” Rose asked softly and the Doctor realized just how deeply his frown had tugged his lips as he looked out on the damage.

“He saw the same Third Moon I knew, from everything he described. Alive and at its peak. All those hundreds and hundreds of years packed into fifty? The Moment isn’t just cracking open the fabric of the universe on a physical level, but temporal as well.”

“Then it does reach it all,” the Master mused softly and the Doctor turned to study him. Gone was the teasing grin and - what he believed to be - the façade of comradery. Left in his place was that cunning and clever mind that the Doctor had known more days that he hadn’t. The one that had been driven slowly mad over the centuries, the schism reaching so deeply into his soul that it hadn’t just frightened him, it had unmoored him. The War Doctor had said that he knew the Master was working his own angle, but if they weren’t careful, they’d lead him right to it. The Moment cracking open time and space was bad enough, but the Master with his hands on it? There was no telling what mischief he’d be able to bring with that kind of power at his fingertips. 

“It’s ‘spose to be in there, yeah?” Rose asked, motioning towards what had been a mountain range once that was now crushed and crumbling under the formerly floating city. “Thing’s gotta be givin’ off one hell of a signal, right?”

The War Doctor pulled out his own sonic screwdriver - much more old, beaten up, and wartorn than the one he’d had the TARDIS reconstruct after the war - and held it up, adjusting whatever settings he’d had in it last and it gave off a sharp sound that indicated that they were, it would seem, aimed in the right direction. 

There was a heavy moment that accompanied and then followed the sound as no one moved. The Doctor could feel Rose’s eyes on him, though his own gaze was fixed on the ruins of the city, the possibility of facing that Moment again becoming so much more than just a rescue mission for the universe they now called home. Finally, the Master gave a frustrated huff, snapped the War Doctor’s sonic from his hand, and started forward with it to follow the sound. 

“Wait!” the Doctor called out and received an irritated look for his efforts. “ Think . If it’s in there, once we find it and close it, any protection that the Moment was giving itself will be shut off.”

The Master stared at him, brows drawing together and eyes narrowed. Then, all at once, his expression eased back. “Of course. The TARDISes will make for quick getaways.”

“For all four of us,” the Doctor pressed and the Master offered him an utterly put-on smile.

“What exactly do you expect me to do, Doctor? Steal the Moment once you two do-gooders have it closed, take off with your TARDIS, and leave you all for dead on a fractured and dying moon?”

“Thought’s clearly crossed your mind,” Rose grumbled and the War Doctor huffed a frustrated sigh from his place. 

“I think not. Both will be locked.” The Master shot him a feigned hurt look. “Oh stop it. Do you really think we’re so focused on the Moment that we’d forget about your darker impulses?”

“You wound me.”

“I saved you. If I’d trusted every instinct you’d instilled in me over the years and simply left you in that field, you’d be dead.”

“The benevolent Doctor,” the Master purred, his gaze latched fully on the War Doctor who met it with a calm that spoke of all he’d seen as of late. 

The battle of wills was interrupted as the ground trembled under their feet. Rose stumbled and the Doctor reached out, catching her even as he shifted his own stance to keep up with the moving ground beneathing them. Dust and debris fell from the mountain ahead, the small earthquake doing more damage. “So much for the protections,” she muttered and he gave her arm a quick squeeze.

Another violent shudder effectively ended any argument that may have still been going on, both parties scurrying to the protective encasing of their TARDISes as the mountain shook and trembled. The Doctor rushed to the controls, keying in a connection with the War Doctor’s and putting him in over the loudspeaker. “Hello? Hello? Gotcha. You seein’ what I’m seein’?”

“ Fluctuations in temporal energies ,” the War Doctor’s voice echoed through the speakers.

“Please tell me that doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means,” Rose managed, her expression more than a little worried.

“That we’re working against borrowed time,” the Doctor confirmed and tried to pull a smile out for her. “C’mon now. No difference in any other day.”

“The old days maybe.”

“Well, we wanted to travel again. This is just the bit along the way.” 

That finally pulled a smile from her, albeit strained as the moon shook under the TARDIS once more before settling back down. 

“ I have what appears to be a steady landing pad close to the signal. Sending now ,” the War Doctor chimed in and the coordinates within the fallen structure flashed across the screen. 

“See you inside,” the Doctor answered, glancing over to Rose. She gave him a nod of approval and he flipped a switch, pulled a lever, and they were off.

----

They didn’t have to jump through the Time Vortex, just from the base of the mountain to inside where the coordinates put them down. Rose felt the TARDIS reappear on steadier ground, the shaking and shuddering minimal where they were. “So what happens?” she asked as the Doctor rounded the console to take a look at some of his readouts.

“With what?”

“When you and the other Doctor close it?”

“Best case: we get enough time to run.”

“What’s gonna happen around us?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe utter annihilation.”

“And to any of the people living ‘round here?”

“Looks like everybody’s either run or been killed already though.” He stopped and turned to her, that awed expression that he got sometimes played out across his face. “I tell you the best case scenario is we have a few seconds to run and your next question isn't the worst case for us, it’s the people around us.” The corners of his mouth turned up, the smile still holding traces of that same awe. “Rose Tyler, you will never cease to amaze me.”

“Well, if we all die here I might,” she laughed and joined him at the console.

“I won’t let that happen.”

“Well you’re not shovin’ me in the TARDIS and sending me home, you got that?” she told him firmly, the tone holding traces of a tease, but the memory of the last time he’d tried that hung heavy in the TARDIS they’d built together that reminded her so much of the one she’d traveled the stars with him in in their own world. She pushed a steadying breath out through her nose. “Anyway. If we don’t fix this, Mum and Dad and Tony… everybody is gone, aren’t they?”

“Eventually, yes. Might be tomorrow, might be fifty years from now, but the Moment is what’s been shredding this universe’s natural defenses.”

Rose nodded and reached out, her fingers grasping his and he took her hand. It was funny, how simple that gesture was. She probably wasn’t the first pretty girl he’d grabbed the hand of and dragged away from some impending doom, but she was the one that he’d decided to stay with.  If it was the luck of the draw when it came to the metacrisis regeneration or something in his subconscious that had tilted him further human in his lifespan, she might never truly know. What she did know was that he’d chosen to spend those days with her, no matter how long or short that they were, and she’d chosen the same. It wasn’t an easy feat, saving the universe, but together maybe they could manage. 

His fingers closed in around hers and he lifted her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “Ready?”

“Let’s do this,” she answered with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. 

The door to the TARDIS opened and the Doctor led her out, a startled yelp from him the only warning she had before he went tumbling forward. She stopped instantly, eyes wide as she watched him struggle to gain his footing on the sudden steep incline just outside of the forcefield that surrounded their ship. Rose blinked, her mind slow to reconcile the forty-ish degree incline that the Doctor was stumbling down and the level feeling beneath her feet, despite the same angle the TARDIS had set down at. 

He finally caught his balance, widening his stance and leaning back a bit to keep himself from repeating the motion. “The whole building’s fallen into the mountain,” the Doctor explained as his gaze swept around and up. “The TARDIS’ gravity field only goes so far. Watch your step. First one’s a doozy.”

“I can see that. You alright?”

“Oh yeah. Just had to get my balance.”

She followed more carefully, inching forward until she reached the edge of the force field. She felt the incline suddenly, the sensation bizarre as her sense of gravity and what she saw at her feet finally matched up. Behind her, the War Doctor’s TARDIS began to materialize. 

“Well, that's quite a drop,” the War Doctor proclaimed as he stepped outside with the Master directly behind him. 

Rose couldn’t do more than glance in their direction as she shuffled her way down, but she heard them both following at a quicker - and somehow steadier - pace than she was managing. Finally she and her Doctor reached the end of the incline where the steel of the building met the rust-coloured rock of the mountain. A crack ran inward, tearing the rock open in a jagged fashion. The crack ran as far into the cave as she could see, sometimes wider and sometimes narrower, but when she followed it back, she saw that it snaked its way up the incline as well, the steel pried back like a can of beans. “Doctor?” she called, every ounce of her travels with him and the Torchwood training that came after demanding that she didn’t dare look away from it. 

He hummed a distracted response and she finally tore her eyes away from it. It should have been the very first place he looked, but as she watched him bounce around the cavern with his sonic screwdriver in hand, it was as if he were testing every inch of the space except what was so clearly out of place. Funny enough, though he moved more slowly and with a great deal of intention, the War Doctor seemed to be having the same bizarre and utterly un-Doctor-like reaction. 

Without any further response from him, she finally turned back to the crack and inched towards one of its wider openings, carefully testing each step before committing to it so that she wouldn’t find herself hanging by her fingertips like she had on Gallifrey. Or worse. 

As she inched closer, the strangest sensation that she should be able to hear something that she didn’t took hold of her. A presence touched her mind. That was it. Something foreign and strangely cold at the edges, but warm at the center. She closed her eyes, reaching back.

“I wouldn’t.” Soft brown eyes snapped open and Rose whipped around to see the Master standing next to her, looking carefully interested at the opening. “They say it's sentient.”

“The Moment?” 

“Yes.”

“Then shouldn’t we be listening for it?”

“Listening, sure. Letting it inside your head…” He offered her a strange look, half teasing and half… something. She wasn’t quite sure, but she knew she didn’t like it. 

On impulse, she spun and looked straight down the crack without pause. 

Darkness peered back at her. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, snapping on the lantern app and looking down again to see that the only thing down there appeared to be debris from when the crack opened. “What does it look like? The Moment, I mean?”

“A box,” the two Doctors answered together.

“Gold with intricate craftsmanship,” the War Doctor clarified. 

“Don’t see anythin’ down there that looks like that,” Rose confirmed, finally stepping away and turning a cheeky look on her love’s frienemy. “Just took a quick look for ya. Nothin’ to be scared of.”

He pushed a long breath out through his nose. “They are young, aren't they, Doctor?”

“Who?” her Doctor answered from where he was looking at his readings. 

“Your companions. Just children, really, in the grand scheme of life. So finite. Gone before you know it.” He turned his attention back on her and as Rose squared her shoulders and met his gaze, she could have sworn that she felt something touch her mind, but it wasn't anything like before. No, this was chilling, and in the distance she could have sworn she heard the steady beating of drums, not unlike the Doctor’s dual heartbeats before the metacrisis regeneration. It was subtle, but there, and all at once she remembered what the Doctor told her on the rare occasion that he looked into her mind: shut the door to any thought she wanted to keep private. 

Rose slammed a door the size of Big Ben. 

The Master gave a subtle wince at it. “Clever girl,” he muttered, and it was hardly the praise it was when it came from the Doctor. “Someone’s given you lessons.”

“Just be glad I didn’t use the methods Torchwood taught me,” Rose answered, the corner of her lips quirking upward. 

She glanced over as footsteps approached, the Master’s antics drawing both Doctors, but as hers came to stand with her, the War Doctor finally seemed to notice the crack, his sonic sounding off at the readings. “Fascinating. There are traces, as if it was here and now it’s not.”

“It’s moving? How?” Rose asked. 

“Well,” her Doctor drawled, now squatting down on his heels to take a closer look, “it’s the most dangerous weapon in the universe. And it’s sentient.”

“You think it’s trying to tell us something?”

“Maybe. Question is what. And from where. Maybe even when.” He popped to his feet as the Master strode past him, following the crack back into the cave. The blond Time Lord didn’t seem interested in inviting them along, but instead sauntered his way back at his own pace, pulling a heavy sigh from the War Doctor and Rose’s Doctor shook his head a little and started after the other two. 

The four of them followed the crack back into the darkness, Rose using her phone to cast at least enough light that they didn’t lose track of it and didn’t fall in at the point that it yawned open and swung hard to the right as as if it’d been a car that had almost missed a turn. As soon as they rounded the corner, a wind picked up and Rose found herself staring up, eyes wide where the crack had climbed the wall, twisting around until it inexplicably left the solid structure and moved into the open air, eventually meeting what looked like a portal of shimmer whites and silvers and greys that lit the whole space. Well, they’d found the source of their wind deep inside a series of caves in a mountain.

The Doctor’s arm instantly flashed out in front of her as if to stop her from moving forward. “Stop,” he snapped, sonic in hand and pointed at it. “Don’t go any closer.”

“What is it?” she asked, trying to think of anything she’d seen that might be similar. 

“It’s a time fischer,” the Master answered, his tone bordering on giddy. “Look at it. It’s beautiful.”

“Leave it to you to get all worked up over a tear in the fabric of reality,” the Doctor groused, checking the readings on his sonic. “No…” He shook it, held it to his ear, shook it again, and looked. “No. Oh yes!”

“I take it we’ve found the Moment’s mode of transportation,” the War Doctor huffed, eyeing the fischer warily.

The Doctor flashed a toothy grin. “I think so! What a way… And I’ve got the readings here. All we have to do is take it back to the TARDIS, plug ‘er in, and we’ve got the coordinates.”

“Unless it jumps again,” the Master murmured.

“It’s like it wanted us to find it though,” Rose said softly, remembering the touch on her mind. If this thing was sentient, maybe it didn’t want to destroy everything. Maybe it was just calling for help.

“Only one way to find out,” her Doctor answered, still beaming and bouncing in a way that usually seemed to mean they were set on something of the right track. He definitely thought so.

Rose caught the movement out of the corner of her eye. It was quick, like he’d made the decision and launched into action. The War Doctor shouted as the Master launched himself into the portal without so much as a let’s try this , leaving the other three to stand there and stare as it swallowed him up, closing behind him.

“What… just happened?” Rose managed, not sure she really wanted the confirmation to the ugly hunch.

“The Master just proved why we never trust him.” The Doctor grabbed her hand, pulling her back in the direction of the TARDISes without so much as an Allons-y .

---

He should have known better than to let his guard down. He should have known better than to let the Master of all people anywhere near a portal that might lead to the universe’s most deadly weapon. What he’d do with it if he got his hands on it first was anybody’s best guess and they were stuck twiddling their thumbs until the TARDIS finished running the fischer readings through its database. Upgraded computing power and a handful of other enhancements they’d added to her systems made it a faster option than the War Doctor’s TARDIS, but it was still taking forever . 

“Do you ever sit still?” the War Doctor groused and the Doctor slammed to a stop mid stride for the something-odd time across the console room and threw a glare his way, even if he didn’t bother to answer.

Rose unfolded herself from where she’d taken a seat on one of the grating levels and he met her halfway. She took his hands and he instantly felt some of the anxiety fade. It wasn’t gone, but it was manageable.  “How much time do we have?”

“Enough for him to destroy the entire universe several times over.”

“And we have two time machines.”

“Doesn’t mean we’ll be able to reach it if it’s a fixed point,” the War Doctor said softly.

“Is it?” Rose asked softly, catching and holding the Doctor’s gaze and giving his hands a gentle squeeze with hers. “You can tell if it is, right?”

He took a moment, focusing his mind as best as he could on a moment he didn’t even know if it would exist. “Not yet,” he breathed, mostly certain that was the right answer.

“Fantastic,” she teased and finally he felt his lips tug into something like a smile. “So we have time.”

“For what?”

“To figure out what the difference in this world and our old one is. Why did the Moment here crack open?”

“There could be an endless number of reasons. Just because universes compensate for small changes doesn’t mean it’s every small change. Even things that look small on the surface could have massive ramifications down the line. That’s why we have fixed points to begin with and why --” Rose let go of one of his hands just to put a finger to his lips and quiet him.

“Shouldn’t we see if it has anything to do with us?”

“Should it?” the War Doctor asked, but there was something in his voice… something that knew exactly what the Doctor knew himself. They were at the center of all of this. The likelihood was that the answer revolved around them as well, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

The Doctor loosed a long breath and looked at the computer embedded in the console. They certainly had the time.

The War Doctor must have picked up on the silent concession and stood, vocalizing what they all knew would be the only way to have a chance of pinpoint it. “I could have a look.”

“Why not? Everybody’s been pokin’ ‘round lately,” the Doctor grumbled and then pursed his lips, forcing himself to pull back on the irritation. Rose was right. He knew she was, he just didn’t want her to be right. He didn’t want to relive that day, seeing his own hands against that box, fingers working at the intricate lock and the burst of energy that had thrown him back so hard that the TARDIS had had to come fetch his unconscious self from the desert before the planet burned. His planet. With all those children….

It hadn’t been the War Doctor. It had been him. He’d ended the war that had been ravaging the universe - countless peoples undone, knitted back together, and destroyed again as the Time War raged on in ways they couldn’t even fathom - but at the cost of his own people. He’d sacrificed them. So many Gallifreyans and so, so many children. Wiped from existence. And it was his fault for not finding a better way. 

A hand touched his cheek and he blinked, finding his vision blurry. Rose stared up at him as tears he hadn’t realised were gathering trailed down his cheeks and her expression was strained. “If you don’t want to…” she said softly, her voice broken and he hated making her feel that way on his account.

“You’re right,” he croaked out. “Of course you’re right.”

“You should sit,” the War Doctor said softly, as if he knew. Of course he knew. 

“This won’t knock you out like last time, will it?” Rose asked as he moved to sit on the grating ledge.

“It shouldn’t. They’re my memories, not someone else’s.” His gaze flashed to meet hers. “If that alert goes off, bring us out of it. Gentle hand to his shoulder something like that. Nothing abrupt.”

“Right.”

The War Doctor moved closer and took a seat next to him. “Ready?”

“No, but let’s get it over with.”

He hummed a soft note of understanding and reached forward, sinking the Doctor into his own mind.

He was floating for a moment, weightless and tetherless until he landed feet first into the Plains sands just outside of Arcadia. He could feel the TARDIS - his. The one he’d stolen so long ago and that the other Doctor had left with, not the one that he had built and now shared with Rose that had come to mean so much to the both of them in the last year or so - behind him, her subtle pull on his mind as she begged him not to do it lingering with each step forward that he took. Step after step after step through the sand with a heavy bag slung over his shoulder. It wasn’t the physical weight of the Moment that sunk him down in the sand, but the understanding: he could stay his hand no more.

Look left .

He wasn’t sure whose voice it was, but it sounded off against the suns-drenched sand and forced him to look at what he saw out of the corner of his eye. There was something there. Yes, straight ahead he would find the old barn where he would drop the Moment down to the ground, open up the sack, and find the mechanism that would unleash judgement on Dalek and Gallifreyan alike, but to the left, just out of the corner of his eye, he saw something… Yes. there it was. He saw it fully now. The box from his dream with the girl that looked so much like Rose sitting on it. “Hello.”

“Hello,” she echoed, her eyes flashing gold.

“Who are you?”

“Don’t you know me? Oh no. I don’t know you with that face, do I?” she asked with a tilt of her head, her tousled blonde hair tumbling over one shoulder. “I get it so confused, the past and the future. That face is something you find, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” the Doctor murmured, realising that  his subconscious must have taken the face he currently wore rather than the one he wore during the war. Now didn’t that hurt even more?

“Mm. You’re the one that knows this face. The Bad Wolf.”

“Yes,” he breathed.

“Your clever girl,” the creature that wore his love’s face purred. “Do you remember how she change you? The man you became after the War?”

“Of course. She… reminded me.”

“Of what?”

“That I’m the Doctor. The name I chose to remind myself who I wanted to be. That I could be the Doctor again, even after all my sins.”

“What sins?” the phantom asked, perched on top of what looked to be the Moment. That was it. The memory shook loose as if from a cobweb that had bound it in place. She was the Interface.

“I killed everyone. Not just the Daleks, but innocents too… I made an impossible decision that --”

“Broke you.”

He paused before managing a small, “Yes.”

“No it didn’t.”

He squeezed his eyes shut against the image of all those children he’d counted one dark night. “Yes it did. Until her.”

The Interface smiled a smile that was somehow entirely Rose and entirely not. “And because of her…” A door appeared behind her. “It’s locked, but it’s in here.” She tapped her head. “Do you want to know?”

“Know what?”

“What she did for you? Your Bad Wolf touched Time itself and you think the moment most important to you was exempt?”

The Doctor stepped forward, his feet heavy in the sand, but he made it to the door and laid a hand flat against it. “She’s it, isn't she?”

“Did you really not know that?” the Interface teased. “Open the door and see.”

“I can’t.”

She tilted her head. “It’s your past, just locked away in that dusty old head of yours. Open it and see.”

“There is no Rose here. I mean, there is, obviously, but not a version of her born into this world. Do I… do I have to give her up to save everyone?” he asked softly, hating each world that left him. “Is that what has to happen?” He couldn’t look at her, couldn’t watch her expression. All he could picture in his mind’s mind was Rose disappearing from everything, sacrificed to close the Moment and save the Universe. 

“You’re a dramatic boy, aren’t you?” 

There was a beat, and then another and then another. 

“You can always take the road your mind remembers, but it won’t tell you anything new,” she said quietly. “It’s a lie, what you remember. Built out of a paradox. If you want to save this world, you have to show him how you saved yours.”

The Doctor grit his teeth and set his jaw, murmuring a silent promise to Rose. I love you , the three worlds that had been so hard to say, even now that it didn’t mean that she could spend her life with him, but that he’d have to find a way to watch her grow old and die and just… keep on living somehow. The words that he promised he’d always say to her, no matter how difficult, how hard all the years fought against the openness. As long as she’d have him, he was, without a doubt, hers. But if he didn’t do this, if he didn’t open this door, they might not be able to save her family. That’s something that she’d never forgive him for. If the universe tried to claim her as its prize, he’d fight. He’d find a way. Decision made, he pushed it open.

A flood of memories struck him. He saw a man with his own face - the other Doctor, presumably - and a man that the other Doctor would eventually become. He saw flashes of time, of people, of places, and finally, he saw the three of them standing over a big red button that should never, ever be pushed. 

And they didn’t.

No, the thought occurred to them at once, and the Doctor felt like he was sped through the events so that he saw it from his first incarnation, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and the War Doctor as they came together with his other incarnations and worked together as one to save Gallifrey. Thirteen TARDISes spinning together, tucking it away into a pocket universe and all the Daleks firing on each other, destroying their ships.

But Gallifrey was safe, hidden away in a sliver of time like a Time Lord painting. In a moment where there was no good choice to be made, they - all of him - had fought back and made a better choice. Gallifrey stood.

The Doctor’s eyes snapped open and Rose’s hands were on his face. Tears streamed from his eyes and he could feel the stickiness on his cheeks and she tried to get him to focus on her rather than through her. “You with me?”

“Yeah,” he managed, feeling his head spin.

“Okay then.” She didn’t release her hold on him as she looked over, supposedly at the War Doctor.

“It’s you,” he croaked out, his voice raspy and filled with as much emotion as the Doctor felt welling up in himself. “It’s always been you.”

“What has?” Rose asked, her tone filled with all the confusion of someone that hadn’t been along for the trip of a lifetime.

“Everything,” the Doctor answered for his counterpart. “You sent the Bad Wolf back far enough that she made it through the Time Lock and the Moment took your face. Gallifrey didn’t fall, Rose. Gallifrey is whole. You set up all the pieces so that I could make a better choice.”

“What does that mean for this world?” she asked, not quite finding the full understanding of what was happening.

“That I never knew you,” the War Doctor answered. “That you… shouldn’t exist in this world. I’ll never meet my version of you to be the face that the Moment takes.”

“So it took countermeasures.”

“Does that help?” Rose asked.

“I don’t know,” the Doctor answered softly and leaned into her for a moment, soaking in the feeling of her arms encircling him as he did. They stayed like that for a moment before the alarms on the TARDIS began to sound. He popped up, Rose only a fraction of a second behind him as they both rushed to the console. “She found it!”

“Doctor, that’s not an alert,” Rose argued, and he was about ready to show her the readouts, plain as day, as the floor shook beneath them and he turned to a different viewport that showed Gallifreyan military ships incoming. They were under attack.

Chapter Text

“No no no no !” the Doctor yelled, the alarms blaring all around them and he spun to look at another readout. “Mid-class, a few other TARDISes. They think we’ll make a jump for it - fair enough, we’re gonna make a jump for it - but how? They can’t track us through the Vortex. Better yet, how’d you lot find us here? I ditched all of your trackers!” 

“TARDISes are military ships?” Rose asked, even though she’d assumed the questions would be lost amongst the stream-of-consciousness question-and-answer that the Doctor was playing with himself to try to figure out how they’d been found and how to keep it from happening again.

“A Battle TARDIS is,” the War Doctor answered, already halfway to the door and Rose made a jump for him, catching the sleeve of his jacket just before he flung it open. 

“They’re right on top of us!”

“Then we need to leave, and to do that I need to get to my own ship,” he argued.

“She’s right,” her Doctor answered and Rose glanced back, seeing him digging through his bigger-on-the-inside pockets of his suit jacket. “The whole structure was only barely stable when we landed. You’re just as likely to get crushed by falling debris as make it.” He stopped digging, eyes narrowed and looked to be running some mental calculation. “More--”

“I know my odds, but I’m not leaving her,” the War Doctor snapped.

That brought the Doctor fully out of his distraction, everything shaking around them as a blast hit far too close for comfort. His gaze was fixed on his alternate self. “I know what she means to you and I swear we’ll come back for her, but we jumped into this mess to make sure they don’t kill you.”

“Fat lot of good that’s done,” his counterpart groused. 

Rose shot him a look and motioned for the jacket. He tossed it to her and she continued his search. “What am I looking for?”

“Anything track-y. Blinking red light, probably. No point in leaving until we find it or they’ll be right on us.”

“And you’re sure it’s in here ?”

“In your sight the whole time I was out on Gallifrey?”

“Fair point.” She dug a little deeper. Thankfully, the War Doctor took an intentional step away from the door to let them do what they needed to to get away and stop the Moment.

The Doctor slammed a palm against the external communicator. “This is the Doctor calling the fleet commander. Can you hear me? Hello?”

There was a brief moment before there was a crackle of static and, from what Rose could see from the back side of the monitor, someone must have appeared. Her Doctor’s expression darkened. “Rassilon, we had a deal!”

“ The longer he remains at large, the more danger Gallifrey is in . My responsibility remains to all my people .”

A snarl escaped him. “Killing him does nothing ! He’s not causing this! The Moment is hopping through time fischers.”

“ Is that what he’s told you ?”

Rose kept digging. A pocket watch, a bag of candy, a scarf that seemed to go on forever, a monocle, his reading glasses, and - for some reason that she wasn’t sure she wanted to know - a stick of celery.

“We found one. This does not have to end with the annihilation of Gallifrey, but it doesn’t have to end with his death either. Give me time. We’re almost there!”

“ I’m sorry, Doctor, but I’ve given you all we have. You only saw a fraction of what’s happened to the Citadel. Outside of our walls… Estrigal, Patrexi, Arcadia… This has to stop. You and I both know what the Master is capable of doing once he’s in someone’s mind .”

“We’ve known the Master since we were children. Do you really think he wouldn’t know how to block him out?”

“ He is not you, Doctor. Surely you’ve figured it out by now: the difference in this world and yours. What would you have become without her? Are you truly willing to risk that, knowing what you do? ”

Rose could practically feel the War Doctor stiffen behind her at the implication, but she didn’t have time to look. Not when her fingers finally closed around something useful. “Doctor!”

He whipped around to look, seeing the blinking red - she hoped - tracker in her hand. A soon as she received the curt nod from him she chucked it out the door of the TARDIS and slammed it shut, locking it.

The Doctor turned back to the screen. “You know, if you didn’t want a sentient destroyer of galaxies to go all wonky, maybe you shouldn’t have created it in the first place. Ever think that?” He reached over and yanked on the lever hard, not bothering with any of the usual prep work, and they were slammed into motion, shaking Rose and the other Doctor off their feet. Her own clung the the console, anger rolling off of him in waves.

“You think that was the only one?” the War Doctor asked.

“Buried deep enough,” Rose grumbled, picking herself up off the floor.

“That was the backup of the backup of the backup,” the Doctor said as he rounded the console to where the computer had sounded the alert that its calculations were done with the coordinates just before the attack. He smacked the monitor once and looked at another readout. “C’mon, girl,” he muttered and bounced around to the other side.

Rose joined him, blocking his path so that he had to look at her rather than continue with his manic motions. “Hey. What do you need?”

Her voice seemed to calm his thoughts. He took her hand and guided it over to a set of controls. “Keep these steady when I put those coordinates in.” He motioned to his counterpart. “Over here! Right here. Yep, that’s the one,” he offered as the other Doctor moved towards a push-pull device that he’d described as a throttle of sort when she’d helped him put it into place. 

“Shouldn’t the stabilisers handle this?” the War Doctor asked as her Doctor rounded back to his monitor. He flipped it around to show the TARDIS, several sectors flashing an angry red. “Oh,” he breathed and Rose felt a tug on her heart as she realised their ship had taken on more damage than they themselves had felt.

“Got it?” the doctor verified. He waited for the confirmations before his long, deft fingers flew over the keys, sorting out their destination. “Okay… okay….” he murmured to himself before striking the last button with gusto. “Allons-y!”

The TARDIS shuddered violently, sparked, and smoke poured out from under the grating. 

“No!!” he shouted, typing in another command and then dragging a piece of the grating back to get beneath. 

Rose made sure her controls were still holding steady before she leaned over to get eyes on her love who was working feverishly below the console. “Keep doing what we’re doing?”

“Yep!”

“We are away from the actual firepower, yeah?”

“Yep!”

“Well, that’s something,” she muttered to herself and a tremor brought her attention back to the task at hand. She shifted the knob just a little and it settled back out.

“That’s a girl!” the Doctor cheered and she wasn’t sure if he was talking to the ship or to her. Wasn’t that the story of their lives?

He was back up then and looked much happier than before. “As I was saying,” he announced dramatically and threw a switch. There was no sparking this time, only the familiar sound of the TARDIS launching them through time and space towards what hoped was the conclusion of this particular big adventure. What a way to break a new TARDIS in.

---

He remembered the moments that stretched into hours that stretched into days that stretched into years after the Time War. After waking up in the TARDIS, hurdling through the Time Vortex, he’d been adrift. Sure, there’d been plenty of destruction left in the war’s wake to keep him busy and the occasional individuals that came along with that, but Rose had been an anchor. Not one he’d taken hold of willingly, but there was something about her that had touched his scarred hearts in a way that he couldn’t have possibly understood the moment he’d grabbed her hand and told her to run. She had restored his hope. She consistently restored his faith. 

He didn’t want to know what he would have been without her, but that didn’t mean that he was ready to throw the War Doctor away either. Certainly not when he knew what it felt like to be desperate and broken after making the terrible decision when there was no right decision available to make. Not without her to touch his soul, so it seemed. Rose had restored the hope he’d shared out into the galaxy for so long and it had reverberated back in time and etched its way into his soul even before meeting her. Just because this Doctor wouldn’t have that same meeting didn’t mean that they should abandon him. He had his own path. They just had to help him get there. 

The TARDIS set down with a soft shudder and the Doctor looked at the readings. “Okay… Everything looks good,” he murmured. “No immediate signs of danger. Let’s see what we have.”

He met Rose and they moved together to join the War Doctor at the bottom of the ramp that led them to the door. He led them up - not entirely sure when Rose had grabbed his hand but hardly complaining - and he pushed the door open to --

A warzone.

“So much for no immediate signs of danger,” she deadpanned from behind him.

“But there weren’t!” he argued, turning back, but not having a clear path to his console with the other two in the path. He looked back out to see Gallifreyan soldiers in full military gear darting around, beams of energy blasting buildings and hitting the ground so that it exploded upward to send pieces of rubble flying through the air…. just to rubberband back, the movement instant, resetting everyone where they’d been. 

“What’s that now?” Rose demanded, clearly seeing what he had.

The War Doctor stepped out as well and he pulled his sonic before the Doctor could. He ran a quick scan, looked, and frowned. “That’s not possible.”

“Care to share?” the other Doctor asked, peering over at the readings. “Oh.”

“Okay, boys, that’s not fair,” Rose groused.

“We’re in a painting.”

“Say again?”

“A painting,” the Doctor said again.

She frowned. “Last I checked, painting’s don’t move. Unless your crazy alien paintings have some Harry Potter shenanigans going on.”

“Our crazy alien paintings do,” the War Doctor confirmed, and she shot him a disbelieving look.

“It’s a slice of time,” the Doctor explained, hand sweeping the scene. “Time Lord art.”

“Bigger on the inside?”

“Exactly.”

“But why would the coordinates send us here?”

“That is the question,” the Doctor murmured as he pulled his own sonic out, sweeping it out to take a reading of the area. A Dalek energy beam struck out right next to it, startling him. 

“But nothing actually happens in here, right? We can’t be hurt?” Rose asked skeptically.

“I honestly don’t know. Never had coordinates to land inside a painting before.”

“It shouldn’t even be possible,” the War Doctor said. “Not without more than we have at hand.”

“The Moment, then,” the Doctor answered, and as if on cue the time fischer opened in the sky. No one in the painting reacted to it. There was no telling if they could even see it.

The Moment appeared on the ground, cracked open and much the way the Doctor remembered it: all gold etchings and a big, red button that should never, ever be pushed. It was ornate, though not protruding quite as much as he’d seen it. Instead, on the side cracked open, the button was visible between the panels and golden light poured from it.

Just after it came the Master, flying through the time fischer and landing hard on the ground. He rolled to his feet, spotting it, and spotting the two Doctors and Rose only a beat after.

Then everything happened at once. The Doctors both lunged for the Moment, assuming that the Master would as well, but instead he went for a soldier trapped forever in the loop of the painting. He grabbed his weapon, slamming the butt of the gun against his temple in case the painting soldier dared to complain, and whirled it on Rose. 

Both Doctors froze.

“That’s a couple of good boys,” the Master chuckled. “Wouldn’t want my finger to slip. Powerful weapon here. I think this one is from my time in the war.”

“Don’t,” the Doctor breathed, his voice more desperate than he would have preferred.

The Master loosed a breath, motioning for them to both take a step back and they did. “I didn’t want it to come to this. I really didn’t. They promised it wouldn’t. Do you remember, Thete, when we were young? There was a sound. No one else heard it, but it drummed on, inside my head. Quiet. Sporadic. Easy enough to ignore when times called for it. Come on now, Rose. Over that way.” He motioned and the Doctor saw her shift out of the corner of his eye. He wanted to reach out, wanted to stop her, but if he did he’d likely sign her death certificate. “Good girl. Do you hear it?”

“Pretty sure you’re the only one that does,” she answered, his brave Rose’s voice steady and firm.

The Master snorted a mirthless laugh. “Story of my life.” He turned his attention back to the Doctors. “It was manageable until Skaro and San Francisco. Then they brought me back for the War. Their perfect weapon,” he sing-songed. “But I heard it, louder than ever. They wouldn’t stop it. They wouldn’t even listen . But now they will.” His eyes met the War Doctor’s. “It may be a galaxy eater, Doctor, but it is sentient, and it can send it out to all of Gallifrey. They that thought it was worth my suffering for their lives. It may burn us all, but everybody’s gonna hear the drumming before it does.”

“No,” the War Doctor breathed. “They won’t. They’re just going to hear the endless silence.”

“All the better.”

“This is madness.”

“And who made me mad?” He turned to Rose. “Into the TARDIS.”

“No,” she said firmly and squared her shoulders.

He leveled the gun fully at her. “I’ll blow your head off right in front of him, and then we’ll see where your precious Doctor lands.”

“Rose,” the Doctor managed, his voice pleading.

“I can’t leave you here.”

“Go,” he whispered, hoping beyond hope that she’d feel the promise that he’d come for her deep in her bones. She always had. She always would. And he always would.

The Master snagged the Moment with his free hand, fingers looping under the open panel and hauling it off the ground with surprising ease. With the gun in his other hand, he motioned for Rose to move forward. She did, and the Doctor held her gaze the whole way until the Master shoved her inside of their TARDIS, the doors eventually closing behind them. 

And he stood frozen as the wheezing sound of his ship betraying him filled his ears, taking away his love and sealing her fate as clearly as he had. His jaw dropped and a short breath escaped him. The Master was going to blow it all apart, and he’d doomed Rose along with the whole universe.

“Doctor!” the War Doctor growled out, shaking him, and he realized he had been near-catatonic watching her go. “We have to get out there.”

In slow motion, just like the painting around them, the Doctor blinked hard and shoved the pain back. He had to focus or he’d truly damned her. 

A Dalek moved near them, the screams of Exterminate! in their ears, but both Doctors leveled their sonic screwdrivers, the combined forces turning the scientific instruments into a weapon, and hurled the Dalek through the paned glass of the painting, opening them up to the outside world. 

---

Rose stumbled a couple of steps as the Master threw her forward to slam the doors closed behind them. She used the moment to launch herself towards the console, her fingers just reaching it as a voice sounded off behind her. “Hands where I can see them, little girl.”

She set her jaw and slowly raised her hands. If that gun was anything like the one she’d taken dimension hopping with her, he didn’t need to be an exceptional shot with it. He just needed to be aimed in her general direction. Granted, he might take the entire console out too, but in his state she wasn’t sure he cared about that. He motioned and she moved out of his way as he set them into motion, the TARDIS wheezing its way out of the painting and leaving the two Doctors stranded there.

Rose backed up until she hit the railing, making sure to keep herself as non-threatening as possible. “Hey,” she said softly. “You said they wouldn’t help you. The Time Lords? Is that what you meant?”

The Master gave a noticeable twitch and she made a show of her hands up, palms outward. When he didn’t answer, she tried again. “I don’t know what they did to you, but they haven’t exactly proven trustworthy. We have. The Doctor has, both of them. Yours risked his life to help you and mine --”

“Enough!” he snarled and he moved back towards the Moment that was still sitting cracked on the TARDIS floor, almost as if he thought she might try to go for that next. When he looked back at her, there was something truly cracked behind his expression. There was nothing of the playful antics from when she’d first met him, consistently seeing how far he could push it with her Doctor and fishing for any details he could get from either one of them. This wasn’t even the clever mischievousness from the caves where she’d locked him out of her mind. As she looked him over, she saw his finger tapping against the side of the gun’s trigger. He seemed to notice her watching it. “Do you hear it now, Rose Tyler?”

“Sure. Yep,” she tried and he snorted.

“You’re certainly not the worst of his little tag-alongs, I’ll give you that. And I have no doubt that he thinks he can help me. He always did have a bit of a savior complex, even with this.” He turned his dark eyes back down to the Moment and squatted on his heels, dropping the gun to the floor as he reached for it, ready to pry the side open a bit more. 

Rose snapped into motion again, slamming the palm of her hand down on the nearest button she could reach. The gravity destabiliser. Right. Sure. Why did they even have that?

The whole TARDIS shifted, throwing both Human and Time Lord off their feet. Rose hit the console hard before being tossed back and into the railing, knocking the breath out of her with a pained ooof ! The ship shuddered and Rose felt her stomach turn as the grating beneath her feet suddenly wasn’t there anymore and she was free-falling forward towards the doors. Well, at least she wasn’t falling back into the swimming pool, she thought as she desperately tried to get her feet back under her, the Moment sliding just out of both of their grasps.

----

The two Doctors landed hard on the other side of the painting and in what looked like an art gallery on Gallifrey. Everything was in shambles, from the cracked marble floor to the paintings that hung askew, and a silence that spoke only of abandonment. 

The War Doctor was already in motion for the door, but the Doctor reached out and stopped him. “Give it a second.”

“Your girl may not have a second,” the Soldier snapped.

“My girl’s why we’re waiting. Just….” He sucked in a lungful of air, the gallery painfully quiet around them until the wheezing of the TARDIS materializing echoed around them. A grin split his face and he turned to his counterpart, about ready to tell him that he could always bet on Rose Tyler, but the TARDIS came in at an angle. 

A very horizontal angle. 

The doors swung open towards the floor where the ship was hovering and the Master and Rose both came falling out of it. She landed on top of him and rolled, pulling a screech of fury from the Time Lord, but the Doctors were already in motion. 

The Doctor pulled Rose out of the way as the War Doctor slammed into the Master, the latter only halfway to his feet when he hit the floor and the match began. Rose, for her part, looked mostly whole, with the exception of the blood trailing down the side of her face from her temple. The Doctor reached forward, but she brushed him off. “It’s fine. The Moment!”

Right. He looked up and into their TARDIS that was still hovering a couple meters above them. Behind them, though, the War Doctor was struggling with the Master, who looked just shy of gaining the upper hand. They might have been the same age, but the Master’s latest regeneration had left him young and strong while the War Doctor looked to have just about worn the form he took down to its last. He had more fight in him than the Doctor might have expected, but it couldn’t last. He started to dart over to help.

“No! There’s no time!” the War Doctor shouted, startling both the Doctor and Rose to a stop. He had the Master in a headlock and was dragging him back towards the painting they’d just escaped from. “I may not know who I’ll become without her, but I know who I am today.” 

Oh. The meaning struck the other Doctor and he felt his chest tighten at the realization. He was buying them time, sacrificing himself so that the Doctor had a chance. Maybe not one with great odds, judging by the strangled sound that the TARDIS was starting to make and the smoke pouring out of her with the cracked Moment still inside, but it was still a chance. 

The Master seemed to realize what was happening. “No, don’t you --” He tried to dig his heels in, but there was nothing to hold onto and the War Doctor had the momentum backwards. 

Brown eyes met a slightly different shade and the Doctor gave a terse nod of understanding as he watched the War Doctor throw his weight back, both he and the Master tumbling back into the painting. 

“Won’t they just --?” Rose was asking, but the Doctor was already in motion.

“Got it!” Sonic in hand he thumbed the settings and ripped open the panel on the side of the golden frame. It buzzed, locking the image once more, the War Doctor holding the Master there until the final piece snapped back into place, imprisoning them both.

A shaking breath left him and he turned back to the TARDIS, noting Rose’s worried look. He reached out, thumb soft against her cheek, and he tried for a smile. “This is gonna work --”

“I hear a but in there.”

“But even when it does,” he said pointedly, “if I can’t get it out of the TARDIS, there could be a huge energy surge. I want you out of the blast zone.”

“What about you?”

“Oh you know me. I’m durable.”

“Not as durable as you used to be!” she snapped.

He opened his mouth, an easy joke ready there, but he swallowed it back at the terrified look she was wearing. Instead he leaned down and pressed a kiss to her lips. She returned it, and if the entire universe hadn’t been on the line, he could have easily stayed there forever. Instead, he pulled back, pressing another quick kiss to her forehead. “I love you, Rose Tyler. At least outside the gallery. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come back in.”

“You better.”

“Go.” He gave her a gentle push in the direction of the doors and, for a fraction of a second, was worried she wouldn’t. As much as she hated it, she did. She put her faith in him and he focused on that as he reached up over his head, fingers latched on the door frame of the off-kilter TARDIS, and hauled himself up and into it. 

Smoke choked him as he crawled his way into it, waving his hand around the clear it away a little. There was no question where the Moment sat, though, as the golden glow pierced through everything from its place still connected to the grating that was essentially set as the wall at the moment. Right. First thing was first. He inched his way over to align himself with the console and jumped for it. He just needed to… there! His fingers on the stabilizer, he shoved the button back into place again. 

Everything shifted and he landed rubber soles down on the grating, getting a better view of the Moment. It was pried open more than before, the cracks starting to form through the TARDIS herself. They were cosmetic for the most part right then, but it was clearly feeding off of the artron energy. If he didn’t get that thing closed now, the Moment wasn’t going to be the only threat to the universe. He wasn’t sure what an exploding TARDIS could do, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

The power radiating off of the Moment was intense, winds kicking the smoke all over the place and making it difficult for him to inch forward. One step, then another, then another, Rose in his mind the whole time. Her smile. Her laugh. Their promises to each other about the future. He had to hold onto that, even as he struggled forward, long fingers touching the ornate edges of the Moment, and he could feel the mix of energies flowing through it. A choked cry escaped him as he got his hands fully on it and he felt the power burning through him, starting at his fingertips and flushing all the way through his system until his single heart gave a painful shudder in his chest.  It was agony. Everything burned in bright gold and as he slammed the Moment closed and, as he felt darkness swallow him up, he realized.

It felt like regeneration.

Chapter Text

He could hear her voice as he drifted close to the surface of consciousness and as he sunk back down into the depths, he dreamt of her face. Of apple grass and her hand in his as cars whizzed by overhead. It was a memory, he realized sluggishly as he turned on his side to look at her, his duster spread out beneath them. A memory-dream. A dream-memory. It didn’t matter. She was still beautiful. His Rose. His Rose that had decided to stay with him, even when his face changed. She knew him more deeply than anyone else had known him. Without even knowing she was doing it, she had picked up the pieces of him after the war and put him back together, mended with hope that he’d never thought he’d feel again. Of purpose. And that smile of hers, as she talked about their first date. Then she reached forward, her fingers against his temple and she pressed a kiss to his forehead that was so gentle that all he could do was breathe her name.

“Doctor? Hey, can you hear me?”

His eyes fluttered open and she was still leaning over him. Her hair was longer now, falling in waves without her straightener. Gone were the Earth-made clothes she’d worn in the dream-memory, now replaced by soft fabrics of the more casual wear on Gallifrey. But that didn’t make sense… Gallifrey was….

Oh. That was right. Both here in Pete’s World and in their own, Gallifrey stood. What a strange relief after so much heartbreak.

“You with me?” she asked softly, her hand against the side of his face and gently directing him to look at her.

The Doctor blinked once, then twice, focusing on her again. “The Moment.”

“Yeah. You were right about the energy blast. They said you’re gonna be alright, but --”

“Wait. Wait,” he managed, squeezing his eyes shut again. He’d forgotten something. Something important. He had to follow the memories back as he hopped into the TARDIS, working his way through the smoke and finally getting to the Moment itself. The sheer power radiating off it had almost been too much. He’d felt like he was burning alive as he reached for the edges, as he willed it to close.

And then it struck him. The golden light. The feeling of burning. The power ripping at every cell of his body. A startled cry left him as he sat up so fast that he likely nearly slammed face-first into Rose. His head screamed at him as he did, but it didn’t matter. “It was--” He reached up to his face, finding familiar features beneath his fingertips. “Oh.” He ran his tongue across his teeth. Nope. That was definitely the same. But it had felt like --

“Doctor!” Rose managed a startled cry as he doubled over in the bed, his chest feeling like a Judoon was learning to tapdance on it. He reached for it instinctively and felt the steady - albeit very quick - beating of his… hearts.

“What?” he breathed, his voice raw and he coughed. He could have sworn he saw a trail of gold escaping his lips and he turned to Rose.

She dragged in an unsteady breath. “Take it easy. They said you’d be alright, but you need to rest.”

“They?”

“Rassilon and the other Time Lords. I’m sorry, I know we probably shouldn’t trust them after what they tried to do to the other Doctor, but I…” She stopped, setting her jaw and the Doctor felt his chest tighten again, but this time it didn’t have anything to do with whatever the Moment had done to him. He straightened and turned, positioning himself so that he sat facing her, the sheets tangled him and his knees bent under him. He didn’t care. All he cared about were the tears starting to form in her eyes and he reached up, running a thumb under one that was trying to escape. She offered him a tight smile and reached for his hand to hold. “There was a blast of power, like a bomb going off. It blew out the TARDIS windows, and even the windows to the gallery. I did go out, I promise.”

The Doctor huffed a soft laugh at that. “Thank you.”

“Mm. Don’t think it’ll happen again,” she tried for a tease and he squeezed her hand encouragingly. She seemed to take the hint and closed her eyes, steadying herself. “I ran back in, the TARDIS was sitting on the gallery floor and smoking. Rassilon and his people must have had another tracker --”

“They’re deep pockets,” he offered and counted it as a win when she laughed.

“Yeah they are. With everything… dealt with, they weren’t so keen on coming after us. He was downright helpful.”

“He can be when people are useful to him.”

“Pretty sure saving the universe put you in that category.”

The Doctor snorted at that and squeezed her hand, shifting where he sat again. Everything was starting to ache, his head most of all. He pressed his thumb into the indent in the bridge of his nose, working it at the pressure building behind his eyes.

“Lay down,” she murmured and shifted so he had room to. Once he had, she settled in next to them, the two of them laying side by side like they had in the dream-memory on New Earth. The difference was that now they were in an oversized bed, likely somewhere on Gallifrey. “Rassilon’s people said that there was some sort of energy that the Moment must have absorbed from the TARDIS. It…” Her nose scrunched a little as she searched for the right words. “I don’t know. He gave me a whole explanation with a bunch of words I didn’t even recognise. I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. We’ll get it sorted,” he promised. “But, Rose…” Another wisp of gold escaped him and he watched it dissipate. “I regenerated. I wasn’t supposed to be able to.”

Rose sighed, still struggling to find the foreign words that had likely been rattled off to her with little thought that Humans didn’t have a baseline for regeneration. It was bizarre and strange to them, and even his clever Rose had trouble wrapping her mind around it fully. How could she? She only experienced it from the outside looking in.

“Sort of,” she said at last. “Rassilon said it was a… biological reset. That’s it! That’s what he called it!”

A smile tugged at his lips and he reached forward, his fingers brushing a stray strand of blonde hair back. “But I look the same? I feel the same.”

“You look the same. Two hearts again, apparently. According to the machine over there.”

“Oh lovely. That’ll speed things along.” She shot him a questioning look. “Two hearts, quicker healing. Also less likely to pick up those nasty bugs that Tony likes to bring over to our place from school.”

She snorted a laugh at that and nestled in, her head tucked under his chin and he wrapped an arm around her middle, his longer fingers playing at the back of her flowing gown she wore.

“A complete reset?” he asked after a long moment.

He felt her tighten her hold on him so that she was pressed against him. “No.”

His brows drew together and he let his hand drift up to stroke at her blonde hair. He had a feeling they were both hedging around the same question, neither of them really wanting to ask. But he knew the answer. Deep down in his bones he knew the answer. He just didn’t know how he felt about it quite yet.

She did, though. She’d always hated the idea that the worst could happen and suddenly there’d be a new man standing in front of her. Likely even more now that they shared a life with him. It was difficult enough from the inside when suddenly you had a whole new face and body, new bone structure and new hair. Even new neural pathways that could affect his personality and the quirks he’d grown so accustomed to over the years. If it was that jolting for him, he could only imagine what it was for his Human love that hadn’t grown up around the Time Lord culture and that he hadn’t had adequate time to explain the process prior to it playing out in front of her that first time. He was pretty sure he’d made some sort of joke about having no head. That probably hadn’t helped either.

He pressed a kiss to the crown of her head. “It’s alright. If it had reset my regenerations, everything would have changed.”

It was meant as a comfort, but she tightened her hold even more. “No, it didn’t reset those, but Rassilon said he could,” she managed, her words rushed as if she were afraid she had to say them quickly or not at all.

“What?” he breathed, but shook his head a little. “No, that’s just --”

“Don’t say no,” she murmured, her voice still strained, but a little steadier. She pulled back just enough so that she could look him in the eyes, and there was so much determination there that it almost broke both beating hearts in his chest. “Not for me. Not because it’s what you think I want.”

“Is it what you want?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He touched his forehead to hers. “Of course it does.”

“I mean, you shouldn’t make your decision off of it,” she said softly. “I know I… you know how I feel about it, but you know how I feel about losing you too. If we’re going to do this - if we’re going to keep running -” the tiniest of laughs escaped at the way they’d both phrased it now -- “then your life is always going to be in danger. I can’t lose you, So I --” she leaned back to catch his gaze again, her voice deadly serious -- “I need it to be the decision you want. Rassilon said you had until the end of the fifteen hours to make it.”

“How long’s it been?”

She pulled her arm up, looking at her wristwatch. “Ten and a half.”

His lips tipped downward and he slowly unwound himself from her. “If I fall back asleep, it could be another ten hours.” He stole a quick kiss and caught her gaze. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“I’ll be back shortly.”

She caught his hand. “Do you know yet?” she ventured and he tried for a smile that felt real.

“No,” he answered honestly, pressed a kiss to her knuckles, and grabbed for his slacks and shirt that had been draped over a chair. Last thing he wanted was to have this conversation in his jim-jams.

----

She’d sat awake with him as he struggled through those first hours that had reminded her so much of right after he’d collapsed on Christmas Day on what felt like a lifetime ago. She had been equal parts relieved that he was alive and terrified that he’d changed again and a whole new man would wake that wore her love’s face. She’d studied it. Every inch. From his mop of brown hair that she’d smoothed back and away from his forehead to his brows that had drawn together as his body tried to adjust to everything it had been through. She counted the subtle freckles against his pale skin and, for the first time, noticed the stubble that showed signs of being away from home too long without a shave. Her parents must be worried sick. She had been worried sick. He was thin, but no thinner than he’d been before. The oversized, flowing clothes that the Time Lords had dressed him in after giving him a good look-over made him look so very, very small, and she’d clung to him as he slept. She hadn’t, though. She’d known what kind of nightmares would have filled her mind if she’d tried.

Now that he was up and dressed and out of the room to try to decide if he was going to take Rassilon up on his offer or not, she knew she should sleep. Should, but wouldn’t. Her mind was spinning too fast with all the questions that neither Rassilon nor his physician that had been looking in on the Doctor had bothered to answer for her in full. A few questions had been met with something that resembled answers, of course, but many had been brushed by, as if they hadn’t taken them seriously. Well, not everyone knew the ends and outs of regeneration over the centuries.

So Rose was left to stew in her own thoughts about the Doctor and what he’d choose. One moment she was kicking herself for not making up her own mind before he left and the next she was reminding herself that she couldn’t make that choice for him. It had been the absolute insane luck of the draw that they’d had these last few years like they’d had. Maybe it was silly to think that they’d have more just the same with a few adventures sprinkled into them.

Somewhere along the way her mind must have slowed down just enough to slip off to sleep between one chaotic thought and the next, because she woke to the sound of the doors sliding open and the Doctor shuffling back in. He still looked worn, as if he were recovering from a bad flu or something, but no more than when he’d left. She didn’t know if restoring his regenerations would do anything to him as he stood now. Just… next time. Next time there was a near-death experience that might have been solved through the med bay rather than every cell in his body giving up on this life for the next because that’s what his DNA was designed to do. So often, she forgot that the man she loved was not Human, even if the metacrisis had left him with a few traits that brought him a little closer to it.

“I could use some fresh air. What’d you think?”

Rose cracked an eye open because, clearly, her act was fooling no one. “As long as we don’t run out on any half-destroyed skybridges.”

“We’re in Arcadia. Gallifrey’s second city. It’s ground level.”

She blinked, realizing she’d never actually asked where the gallery had been. “Oh?”

“It’s nice. Well, it was. Bit war-torn now, but I hear there are still little shops along the main stretch. Fancy a look?”

“You do love a little shop,” she teased softly and he smiled for her.

“Oh, I do.”

She started to untangle herself from the sheets and glanced around for her clothes. She spotted them folded neatly on a chair, likely cleaned and ready just as the Doctor’s had been. Part of her wanted to pull him back into bed, push the conversation off, and revel in the comfort of a few moments of peace following the chaotic storm they’d been thrusted into. Something told her if she did that now, though, she’d never find the courage to ask him about it again. They’d live their lives and she’d find out as they went along if he was growing old with her or just… not. And if not, would he leave her just like the other Doctor had done? Unwilling to say goodbye the long way around.

She could feel his eyes on her as the soft dressing gown they’d given her to sleep in fell at her knees and she padded her way over to the chair, snagged her clothes, and stepped around the corner to change. His gaze hadn’t left the last spot he must have been able to see her as she circled back around, a soft smile gracing his lips, and he reached his hand out to her, fingers wiggling in invitation. She took his hand and they started out together.

Rose hadn’t even thought to ask if their Earth clothes were alright for Gallifreyan culture until they stepped out of the medical building and into the light of the street. It wasn’t over crowded, but it was busy, and she felt like they stuck out amongst that crowd like a couple of sore thumbs. Her Doctor didn’t seem to care, though, as he led her along in his pinstripe slacks and crumpled button up with the sleeves rolled to his elbows in the heat that surrounded them. There were still shadows beneath his eyes, but he wasn’t coughing up wisps of golden energy anymore, which seemed to be a step in the right direction. He led her out and towards the small area of shops that lined the streets along with broken statues and shattered structures, the remnants of a war just now over for the people there.

But the people seemed to understand that it was over, if they knew why or not. When she was little, she remembered her grandfather telling her stories about London after the end of the Second World War. Men were coming home, families were reunited, and there was… hope. Maybe distant, maybe amongst the rubble of the bombs that had fallen during the Blitz, but they had survived. They could rebuild. That’s what she saw in the eyes of the people that milled around the city streets here. Careful, hesitant hope.

“My mother took me there when I was very small,” the Doctor said as he pointed up to a hill. “It was an observatory then. I looked out to the stars and knew I wanted to travel among them.”

“Do you think she --”

“I doubt it, and even if she was, she wouldn’t be mine,” the Doctor answered, his voice somewhere between sadness and resignation. “It’s alright though. These places… they’re all the same as they were, in some form or fashion. It’s brilliant to see them again.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Oh, better. Bit better. Getting there kind of better.”

“That good, huh?”

“Yeah. Yes.” He stopped in the middle of the street and turned to look at her. “I turned him down.”

Rose stared up at him. “What?”

“On the regenerations.”

“Why?”

“Should I not have?”

“No… that’s not what I mean. I just --” She pursed her lips and squeezed his hand in hers. “I just need to know why.”

His lips eased out into a smile. “Regneration’s a funny thing, especially the one that caused the metacrisis. Donna touching the jar with my hand gave it the spark, but you wanna know what really caused it?”

“What’s that?” she managed, the question riding out on a breath.

“I was… I’m not sure I’d ever been as happy as I was when I turned around and saw you that night. Standin’ in the street, that absurd Torchwood-sized gun swung around your shoulder, but it was you. Rose Tyler. I burned up a sun sayin’ goodbye to you, but somehow it never felt like goodbye.”

“Because it wasn’t.”

“No it wasn’t.” He reached forward, his fingers brushing her cheek. “Nothing quite like the pain of dying from a Dalek-inflicted wound. It burns through every nerve in your body, shutting them all down. But I saw you so… sad. Not just that I was dying, but that --”

“I was losing you twice,” she offered the understanding that had taken her longer than she’d like to admit to to figure out.

“Yeah. And I couldn’t leave you. So I didn’t. And I made sure I wouldn’t have to.”

The meaning struck her and she tightened her hold on him. “Doctor…”

“I didn't accept his offer because I want to grow old with you. And I plan to. You and me, Rose Tyler, we’re gonna have so many adventures, of all types. For a long, long time.”

“Together?”

“Long as you’ll have me.”

She grinned up at him, wrapping her arms around his neck. “Forever,” she echoed the promise she’d made him once and he leaned down, pressing a kiss to her lips.

“If that’s the case,” he breathed, “then let’s make it official, hm? What’dya say? Will you marry me properly here, among my people? We can do one back on Earth if you want, but --”

“Yes!” she laughed, not willing to let him go on and on with whatever concession he thought she needed. She just wanted him, and to marry him there on his home planet was more than she could have ever asked for. More than she could have ever hoped. She pulled him into another kiss, holding him there and he sank willingly into it with his long fingers twisted in her hair even as other pedestrians grumbled their way past the happy couple. It didn’t matter what they thought. In that moment, they might as well have been the only two people in the universe.

----

They took their time before going back to Earth. The first few days were split between actually getting to show Rose his home planet and handling outstanding business with Rassilon and what was left of the High Council. The first was certainly more enjoyable, as Rose was fascinated with the one planet they’d both assumed that he’d never be able to take her to. He would have much rather have taken all the time that the TARDIS needed to repair herself to lounge around with her and show her the mountains and the plains and the cities, all the while avoiding the politicking that he hated so much. But Rassilon was unusually patient with him and he’d reluctantly made time for that as well. Peace was made between them and it was time to move on. If Rassilon had to be dealt with in the future, that was a problem he’d find a solution for then.

“He dragged us into this and nearly got us killed and it didn’t even cross your mind to, I dunno, Harriet Jones him?” Rose asked late one night after he’d met with the High Council, drawing a small smile from him.

“Bit harder to do here,” he pointed out as he propped himself up on his elbows to watch her watching him, “but when you’ve lived as long as we’ve all lived, I suppose… we’ve all been a little desperate from time to time. And desperate people often do very foolish things.”

“Do they think they can get him out? The other Doctor, I mean.”

“They said they’ll try. The controls along the frame that hold the stabalisers and the other mechanics to suspend the pocket dimension like that were fused together. It’s there, we can see it, we just can’t get to it.”

“You think they’ll really try?”

“I think I’ll hold them to it,” he whispered, leaning down to press a kiss against her forehead.

That had been their last night in Gallifrey before they headed out to the Third Moon of Melodion bright and early the next morning so that the Doctor could make good on his promise that they’d go back for the War Doctor’s TARDIS. It would be kept safe and sound for him when the Time Lords finally were able to get him out. And then it was back to Earth, though it had taken a smidge longer than they’d anticipated to work out the next part of the adventure when he accidentally landed about thirty-six hours after Rose had taken off rather than the five minutes he’d been aiming for. Jackie’s yelling did finally stop when she spotted the ring on Rose’s left hand: a rose-gold band with tiny pieces of a White-Point Star worked into it. Then the yelling had gone up several decimals and Rose had joined her, her little brother Tony plugging his ears in the corner and rolling his eyes as a good eight-year-old should.

Pete had huffed a short laugh, offered a hand to shake, and muttered something about it being about time.

It hadn’t been a small ask to hold a ceremony on Gallifrey between a Time Lord and a Human, and it grew exponentially when - as he knew she would - Rose wanted her family there. One wedding, whatever simple ceremony was part of his culture’s rare tradition, and surrounded by what was about to be their family. It was a good thing they’d just saved the whole universe or the ask would have very likely been more than the High Council would have granted. As it stood, there were four Humans in the Capital City that technically did not allow any aliens within its walls. He did love a good shakeup of customs.

At least a few were being shaken up. The Doctor turned to look in the length mirror and studied his own reflection. It wasn’t as if he’d never worn robes typically reserved for ceremonies on Gallifrey - graduation, the swearing in of a new Lord President, and, yes, even the very occasional ceremony that the Humans referred to as a wedding - but never with this face or this body. He felt small under all the layers that he’d finally gotten draped in the right order. The reds and oranges of his Academy chapter had been provided to him, even if they hadn’t claimed him in centuries. It was… strange, and he likely wouldn’t have bothered with it if Rose hadn’t asked. Well, he supposed that was on him for taking her through the streets of Arcadia where, even in the lifting shadow of war, Time Lords and Time Ladies strode about in their best. He wondered if he could get away without that horribly stiff headdress that was supposed to go with it.

The ceremony wouldn’t be large. Jackie, Pete, and Tony were there. The Doctor really didn’t have anybody for his side. Donna, Martha, Sarah Jane, and Jack were all on the other side of the Void. They’d never even know this was happening. It would have been nice to have them there.

A knock came at the door. “Yes,” he managed, shaking himself out of that sad thought that was creeping up on a happy day.

The door opened and Jackie Tyler popped her head in. “Well would ya look at that! You look like you belong in some sorta movie, you do. Some big space movie with…” She stopped, and the Doctor wasn’t sure what his face was doing, but there was something so utterly uncomfortable with the expression Jackie was wearing. Like she knew her reaction was expected, but she couldn’t quite see it through. Instead, her eyes were watering, threatening to leave a trail of black mascara down her face and she blinked rapidly to keep that from happening.

“I, uh… No need for all that,” the Doctor managed, taking a step closer to her and not quite sure what to do after. Was this a hugging situation? A patting on the back? Comforting words? Oh! Comforting words! He knew that, except every last idea had left him and he was left standing awkwardly in his robes and staring at his almost-mother-in-law in the doorway, the headdress that someone had clearly decided he couldn’t avoid in her hand, and a near breakdown written all over her face. “Jackie, no… no.”

She smiled through it, handing off the headpiece to dab at her eyes to avoid disaster. “It’s alright. Totally normal, or would be if this were a weddin’ on Earth. But no. My daughter is marrying an alien that I can’t even try to pretend ain’t an alien because I've seen his bloody home world now!”

The Doctor set the headdress to the side and gave her space to enter if she wanted, shutting the door behind her as she barreled in, turning on him in the middle of the room. “What does this all mean?”

“Oh, you’re goin’ full meltdown, are you?” he managed, wondering how far Pete was and if he could find someone in the hall to find him. Probably not.

“You two made life on Earth! You had jobs and a terrace house - you know how much I woulda given for a terrace house raisin’ her? - but no! You had to go ‘n build that ship of yours and take her off to a planet that of course she’s gonna love because it’s yours.”

“In our defense, I was kinda taken by force,” the Doctor offered and instantly raised his hands as Jackie shot him a look. Clearly she wasn’t done with her rant. Right. Okay. Good.

“Just tell me this, Doctor. Are you gonna take her from me? After everything, after all the promises, are you still gonna take her from me?”

The Doctor took a beat, letting a long breath out through his nose and he considered his words. Finally, he caught her gaze. “What did I say, Jackie? All those years ago?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“You said you’d bring her back.”

“I have always brought her back.”

She swallowed hard, blinking back the tears again. “You really do love her, don’t you?”

“You know I do.”

There was a moment when he thought she might try to hug him and he stood ready to backpedal as fast as he could, some excuse about the robes and the ceremony already forming on his lips, but instead she eased back on her heels. “You know I want grandkids, yeah? You better be able to deliver on that, mister.”

His jaw dropped and for the briefest moment, he had no words. Finally, he picked the headdress up again. “I assume this is it?”

“And she’s ready.”

“Couldn’t have said that sooner?”

“I needed to make sure!”

“Oi,” he grumbled, looking back at the mirror and playing with the idea of leaving it off. No. He was all in, might as well have the finishing touches. Headdress in place he turned to Jackie who looked ready to make some off-colour remark and he offered her his arm instead. “This is no small affair here,” he said seriously. “And I’d like to marry her, so I can spend the rest of my life with her.”

Jackie swallowed whatever comment she had ready, nodded, and walked out of the room with him silently, finally stepping ahead as they reached the small chamber area where the ceremony would take place. “She said she wanted Pete to walk her down.”

Not how it was done there, but that was fine. Shatter a few more traditions and reform them into a new one. He liked that idea.

So he entered first, mildly surprised to Rassilon himself standing there to officiate. The Doctor saw a look that said the older Time Lord likely hadn’t expected him to have shown up looking half as respectable by Gallifreyan standards as he did, but none of that mattered as the doors at the other end of the room opened, revealing Rose. His brilliant, fantastic Rose. She was dressed in white, per the tradition in her corner of the Earth, but the dress was clearly Gallifreyan in the way the bodice laced up the front, the sleeves slit and fanning down to show only a sliver of her arms. The skirts were layered, flowing down and catching light that wasn’t there, reds and oranges like the suns setting were stitched into her gown that trailed behind her. Her golden hair fell in waves and her gaze was fixed on him. She’d seen his set of robes, but he hadn’t seen her dress and, even after he’d reminded himself to breathe, he still couldn’t quite manage it.

Pete escorted her to where the Doctor stood and she looked up at him, her smile radiant and she was nearly bouncing with excitement. It was everything he could do not to scoop her up right then and kiss her.

Rassilon produced a strip of simple cloth. “Both of you, take an end,” he instructed and the Doctor reached forward, wrapping it around his palm once to show Rose exactly what to do. She echoed his motion. “If you have words, now’s the time.”

The Doctor’s lips parted, ready to speak, but Rose cut him off. “Just this once, hold the gab,” she teased softly, pulling a bright smile from him. She looked down at her toes, silky shoes peeking out from below the hem of her dress. “Doctor… When we first met, you told me you were the type of man that could feel the Earth spinning beneath your feet. I thought you meant it literal and… you probably did.” She swallowed hard. “It’s more though. It’s about a way of living. It’s about… choosing better things, even when it doesn’t look like you can. It’s about rememberin’ that there’s a billion people spinnin’ with you, but there’s also the ones you love the most, and you’ve got to fight for them all. And you’ve gotta find a way. That’s the kind of man you are. You give everything. And when I said I wanted to stay with you forever, you even made that happen.” Her fingers tightened around the cloth and she looked up at him. “That means everything to me, and you mean everything to me. I wouldn’t share this adventure with anybody else.”

He found himself staring for a long moment in absolute awe. “How am I s’pose to follow that up?” She laughed and he smiled before pulling in a deep breath. “Last few years haven’t been… simple. Or easy.” He heard Jackie snort off to the side. “But your faith in me never failed even when I questioned everything. You knew me, maybe better than I did, and you didn’t let go. I won’t either. Ever.” He took his free hand, putting tension against the strip of cloth and wound it around again, watching her follow his lead. Now, his two fingers holding it taught were the only things separating them and a grin broke out. “It’s you ‘n me, if we’re sailin’ off in the stars or watchin’ one of your awful reality shows.”

“Oi!” she snapped and he lifted an eyebrow.

“How do you still watch those after being in one with a killer robot?” His grin eased, but the smile remained. “Whatever it is, as long as it’s with you, it’s brilliant.”

“Pete Tyler,” Rassilon called out once there was a beat or two of silence between them. “Say: I consent and gladly give.”

Rose glanced back at her dad who was standing just behind her and, in a racking voice, he said, “I consent, and gladly give.”

“Jackie Tyler, the same.”

There was a pause and the Doctor tried to get a look behind him where Jackie stood, but Rose shot her a look. “Mum!”

“Right, right!” Jackie squeaked. “What was it? I gladly give.”

“And consent?” Rassilon deadpanned, his tone revealing some of the irritation leaking through.

“Sure. Yeah.” She stopped and the Doctor could practically feel her staring through him and at Rose. “I consent and gladly give.”

The Doctor held Rose’s gaze. “I’m going to whisper something in your ear. When I say you can’t tell anyone else, it’s --”

“I won’t tell a soul.”

“Okay.” He leaned in, his lips moving stiffly over a name that he hadn’t spoken in centuries. It was funny, River Song had known it in the library with Donna, and for the life of him he hadn’t understood how. There was only one way that he would have told her and he knew, more than he knew anything else, that Rose was the only one that he would tell that name to. Turned out that was true, at least for him.

“What’s that?” Rose asked softly.

“My name. The one given to me when I was born.”

She stared at him, the understanding clear in her eyes before she reached up, and pulled him in, her lips pressed against his and his hands at the side of her face. If Jackie or Pete or little Tony said anything else, it was lost to that kiss. That wonderful, brilliant kiss that could have gone on for a millennia. He’d traveled the stars for nearly that long and had learned so much, but this… only she could teach him this. Only she could fill him up with this kind of hope. His Rose Tyler. This was the life he wanted with her. The one they chose.