A Place in Time (20/30)

[amberfocus]

Chapter Twenty:  Desperation

And it wasn't her Doctor she looked at, was not him she had questioned. It was another. “I’m sorry,” said the too familiar man Rose had handed the album to.  He took it, set it down on the console, his eyes never leaving her face. “I’m so sorry, Rose. I had to do it. I had to.” The Doctor felt panic grip him at the familiarity of that voice, his own voice coming from this man with his face. “And it burns.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked himself as he dropped to his knees next to Rose. "It's too dangerous."  Rose was beginning to stir, the golden light surrounding her in a violent miasma of power. He felt for her pulse. It was there, strong and slightly altered.

“Is she all right?” asked the interloper in the blue suit.

“No thanks to you.” The Doctor was angry. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking my Rose was dead and I’d give anything, anything at all just to see her again. And then I went all golden and I ended up here. I don’t even know what happened to my ship because this isn’t my ship; she doesn’t even sound the same.”

“Well, it's not your ship and she’s not your Rose. She’s my Rose, body and soul!” he snapped.

“Body…oh…oh, you’ve…you two…you've joined with her?”

The Doctor rolled his eyes at his doppelganger’s inability to say the words. “Yes, we had sex, wild passionate hours on end sex. What’s your point?”  He felt fury and possessiveness rise up in him as his alternate self reached towards Rose, pulling his hand back just before he touched her.

“Power in that, power enough to bring me here.” He fell to his knees. “Last of the Time Lords,” he laughed but the sound wasn’t joyful. “The message–YANA–was never about the Master, never about Time Lords even. Just a distraction scattered through time. It was always, always about Rose. Always.”

“What happened to your Rose?” the Doctor asked though he was sure he knew, his voice gone dangerously quiet.

“Which time?” his double asked him.

The Doctor closed his eyes, taking in a deep breath. “You’ve been crossing time lines.” It wasn’t a question.

The words tumbled from the man as if he'd been dying to share this burden with someone who might understand him.  “The first time she died she was killed by a Dalek in an underground bunker, so young, just a child and she didn't deserve it.  She was gone and I was more alone than I've ever been.  I couldn't stand it.  It was one little thing.  I needed her!  The universe owed me.  It's taken so much.  You know how much!  I fixed it, pulled her out of time just in time.  The second time she died trying to save my life. She took the Time Vortex into her and I was too late to get to her. I took it out of her, I regenerated, but she died anyway. And I was alone again.”

The silence that fell between them was frightening. “So you fixed it again,” the Doctor said trying to keep himself from sympathizing with the man, though a part of him understood his pain. “Went back in time, made sure everything fell together right and this time Rose didn’t die.”

“I had to. I knew it by then that I loved her. She was my world. With her I was never alone. She filled up that empty space.  You know that.” The look on the face of his double was begging him to understand. “I made some changes, that’s all, just little ones. I told the TARDIS to hurry faster, to not let her take so much in. And that time around she survived.” His voice broke.

The Doctor looked down at Rose’s face then back up at the stranger with his own face. “And then what?” His voice was hard, implacable, almost cold.

“The werewolf, the wire, the devil, all things I could change, until she fell into the Void. Cybermen, Daleks all around us and she couldn’t hold on. She tried; she tried so hard, my brave Rose. But in the end it didn’t matter. In the end she died again.”

He took in a deep breath that was half sob. “So I went back, told her father, not her father, but her alternate father, told him, told him to save her, that I would find a way and come for her later. And I did, I did. But by the time I found a way to travel to the parallel universe, time had sped on. She’d lived her life and she’d died and you'd already been there, took what little I had left, her things she'd left for me! I tried to go back one more time, to snatch her from the time line sooner. But something happened, the fissure I put in the Void went wrong, and it wouldn’t let me get to her in time.”

He looked up, met the Doctor’s eyes with his own identical brown ones, except that his were anguished in pain. “I found a way and I punched through to that universe, and it burned. And mine burned. And I…I found myself standing here.”  He looked tenderly over at Rose.  "I get to see her, even if she isn't mine."

The Doctor had not noticed when Rose awakened, but now she stood up. “I restore life,” she said her voice oddly changed. And the latch on the TARDIS console came loose, sprang open, coalescing in white hot light that met with golden. “I create myself.” And as she stared into the heart of a TARDIS subtly altered, a form emerged with an agonized cry and another Rose Tyler dressed in a turquoise blue sweater and black tousers fell screaming and then unconscious to the metal grating. “I reorder time and space.” Her arm swept out before her. "I reorder memories.  Everything changes."

The TARDIS shuddered to a halt in time and space. “Back into her universe,” said Rose, “Where both died, neither exist at this moment, where time lines will benefit. You will not leave it again.”  The other Doctor crawled forward and knelt beside the other Rose. He picked her up and the doors to the TARDIS flung open. He stepped through them, up against a white wall Rose had never wanted to see again and then crumbled to the floor with her other self. “I seal it closed.”

The power in Rose drained suddenly, whipping around her like a tornado, then funneling down into the TARDIS. The hatch slammed shut with a decisive clang. A faint shimmer of gold clung to her outline, like an aura, but it no longer radiated from her. She gasped, leaning heavily against the console, her body shaking.

The Doctor came up to her quickly, his arms going around her waist, holding her close to him. “I don’t understand,” she said. “He’s you and yet he let a universe burn…for…for…”

“For you,” the Doctor finished.

“But you would never do that.”

“Almost did, Rose. At the worst of it, I almost did.” She looked at him in shock. “It was a line I couldn’t cross. I knew you wouldn’t want me to cross it. But he did.” The Doctor shook his head. “And that girl you pulled out of reality? Where did she come from?  She wasn't his Rose.”

“An alternate world where it was you who fell into the Void and she wanted to throw herself in after him and she did,” she said gasping at the sharpness of the pain in that memory, a memory not her own but forever engrained in her mind. "The TARDIS, she erased it from their minds. Sent them back to her universe where none of it will have happened that way. They’ll start anew. But we’ll remember.  We'll always remember.”

She took a step away from him and swayed. “My head,” said Rose closing her eyes. “My heart.” Her eyes rolled back into her head and her face folded up in pain. The Doctor reached forward with one hand and flipped a lever and with the other arm he pulled Rose back to him, then swept her up in his arms and sat with her on the jump seat.

“Gentle landing if you can manage it, old girl,” he murmured. The TARDIS acknowledged the request and very gently touched down in the middle of the Torchwood basement. He strode from his ship, Rose held close against him, and for the first time in two years he was terrified.

Ch. 21:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/54704.html