I'm nuts, Doctor who placeholder for teaspoon
Author's Note: This is my first time playing with Dr. Who, and it's such a detailed universe I'm very worried that I missed something in my research. If I've made a glaring error, I would like to fix it, so please review and tell me off. I'm a big girl and I can take it.
Oh, and a plaster is British for a bandaid/bandage.
WHOWHOWHOWHOWHOWHOWHOWHOWHO
"Well?" Rose Tyler-Noble tapped her foot on the metal grating and fixed her husband with an impatient glare, "Aren't we going out?"
Doctor Sean Tyler-Noble stared at the bright white insides of the slightly-too-small doors of their growing TARDIS. "I'm contemplating the methods of removing a plaster. One could take Maya's method of quick and fast, or Matt's slow, methodical wearing away at the adhesive until the thing falls off. Or there's the method on Fasaigi III, where they stand on their heads and…"
"Doctor! You're babbling, which you know I love, but right now…," she gave him a half grin, shaking her head and breathing out a sigh. "With their knack for finding trouble, you can surely study the kids plaster preferences when we are back on Earth. Right now we are here, on Galli…"
"Coordinates 10-0-11-0-0 by 0-2!" the Doctor interrupted quickly. He still could not quite face the name of the planet that he'd destroyed uttering and completely, locked out of time and silenced forever. "There should be nothing here in the Kasterborous System, Rose. Nothing but a black smear of nothingness."
She stroked his arm lovingly, and he had no doubt that she would have taken him into an embrace. He'd have gladly accepted it, returned it, but he felt so poised on the knife's edge of giving up he was loath to get close to her, worried that he'd lose his considerable nerve and drag her back into their bedroom to continue the celebration of their tenth wedding anniversary.
She smiled at him full bore, that tongue between her teeth smile that made him flush with heat. "Naughty, naughty, luv. And if this weren't also our first trip off Earth in the new TARDIS and there was the distinct smell of the Bad Wolf about this entire mess, I'd be more than happy to take you up on the offer…"
"I said that last bit out loud, didn't I?"
"Nah, yer gob isn't to blame this time, luv. My talents seem to be getting better lately, and you weren't exactly thinking quiet-like. And those beautiful eyes weren't exactly focused on my face!"
He blushed pink, something that the full-Time Lord Doctor never would have had to deal with, but something he'd grown resigned to. Especially when Rose giggled and blushed right back at him, despite eleven years of exploring every inch of each other, acres of skins and miles of mind alike. He felt like in her, he'd traversed another universe just as vast and amazing as in all his many regenerations before he'd ever known her. He still ached in sadness for his other self who'd lost her. And sometimes in fear what he could still lose her.
‘I'd stay with you. You know that. You are my forever.’
It was faint, but her thoughts were a clear sweet stream in the caverns of his empty mind, filling him with hope and happiness. Where once he'd been so utterly alone, he had his Rose, and though still on Earth, in another galaxy, Maya and Matthew were bright dots of restless energy, tied to him through more than bonds of blood, but love like he'd never known.
‘Thank you so much, my Rose.’
She tilted her head at him with a smile, and he pressed a kiss to her lips, drawing from her own indomitable courage.
"Well then, wife of mine. Shall we go out and see if we can find trouble?"
"Allons-y!" she declared in her atrocious French, but he wrinkled his nose and pushed open the doors, ducked his head and stepped out into a landscape that really shouldn't be there at all.
The pebbles under his feet felt the same as they had when he was newly loomed. The squeeze of Rose's hand in his was the only thing keeping him tethered to reality as they both took in the view of the silver-leaved trees than chimed softly in the dry breeze of an orange-gold double sunrise.
“Empty,” his voice was a mix of sorrow and awe and loneliness so ancient and profound that it was simply more than human.
“But at least something's here. And who knows what happens in its future? We haven’t mapped…,” Rose stopped suddenly and shook her head, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her cheek against his shoulder. “I’m glad I could see it. I’m glad that we came. It truly is a beautiful planet."
He tipped his head to rest against his wife’s dark blonde hair and looked out toward what would have been called the Mountains of Solace and Solitude. No judgmental Council to pity him his newfound demi-humanity, no Citadel, no Academy, no Eye of Harmony, no Untempered….was there? He swallowed thickly, and for a moment he was filled to the brim with the desire to climb back into their far too smooth and stable baby TARDIS and run back to the simple pleasures of Pete’s World and their two clever, troublemaking children.
In another universe, in another lifetime, he’d looked out into the Untempered Schism and into the Time Vortex, and he’d been filled, hearts and soul, with that desire to run that had made him the rogue Time Lord, an object of alternating derision and fear - and ultimately the death of his people as his world. He walked toward where it had once glimmered in shades of impossible infrared and glaring ultraviolet, hovered there and not there in the way that drew you in until you were forced to confront the impossible nature of reality.
“Where are we going, Doctor?” her voice was falsely calm, but she stared at the glowing edges of the sky before them with a fearless resolution that made her the most beautiful thing in his universe.
He paused. Both he and Rose were more than human. He still part-Time Lord, and she altered by the Bad Wolf. But could either of them survive looking into the Untempered Schism? Would they collapse in death, or share insanity?
"I ran away from a tear in reality once. Just as I've run my entire life - until I chose you," he took a deep breath, but she knew him too well.
"The Untempered Schism. It exists in this universe?" Her voice was filled with awe and she stepped forward, seemingly drawn to it just as much as he was. And why not? If she was still part of whatever Bad Wolf was, what better home for such an entity than the heart of madness that had always lain at the core of Gallifreyan identity?
"It shouldn't. I thought I'd destroyed it all, wiped everything out of creation across every conceivable…"
She put a finger to his lips, "Shush. You may be the Oncoming Storm and the Dealer of Death and whatnot, but you are not all powerful. You did what you had to save a universe. But this is another universe entirely."
He nodded, the argument an old one between them. "A new beginning."
His eyes caught sight of movement and they narrowed in suspicion. There was a figure crawling out of the edge of the Schism. Impossible. "The TARDIS showed no sentient life signs on this planet."
"Well, it did the best it could. It still seems rather hollow though. Something's missing. It could have…"
"The scanners are fully functional. He wasn't there a few minutes ago."
She followed his line of sight and gasped. "Doctor!"
"Oh, it must be bad. Things always go cock-eyed when I'm wearing a cowboy hat. And a cowboy hat with a bow tie! And tweed. I bet he even wears braces. What is this one thinking?”
Chapter 2
The Bad Wolf had been pawing at the edges of her mind for week, leaving her restless and more than eager for their first trip on the new TARDIS, even if it didn't feel quite right yet. Her wolf had been quiet for years, with the exceptions of an odd congratulatory growl of smug pride at the birth of each of their children, the wolf had been quiet. She'd once felt that her mind would never be entirely human again, as Bad Wolf had nipped at her heels and scratched at her dreams constantly through the years she'd spent separate from her Doctor by a universe. It was the Bad Wolf that let her survive the Cannon over and over. The Bad Wolf that let her survive what a normal human could not. She'd thought that would be enough, when she found him, to make her a suitable mate for a Time Lord, that being more than human would make her enough for him. But she'd never gotten the chance to tell him before he'd dumped her back in Pete's World with himself.
But her wolf had been silent then, content with the result, and that as much as anything had let her start to truly believe that the copy - the half human Doctor that became her friend, then her lover, and then her husband in a whirlwind of fights and marathon shags and brilliant swirling emotion - her partner was also truly her Doctor.
The past weeks of restlessness, the wolf songs on the radio. The werewolf sightings in Scotland. That popularity of the terrible movie series with the sparkly werewolves and the half-naked vampires. The odd golden glow in her daughter Maya's eyes. Something was up.
She felt the throb in that more-than-human part of her mind even before she'd followed the Doctor's gaze toward that shimmering, almost painfully attractive light. Then her eyes fell on the figure staggering on unsteady thin legs at the edge of the chasm - no, the Schism. The Untempered Schism that the Doctor had whispered about in the dark of the night when they lay together, too close to tell where one ended and one began, and he told her the secrets that lay in the dark of his eyes in every incarnation.
No one should survive that. No one could have climbed out of that.
But the Doctor had. Of course he had, the blighter.
"Doctor!" she cried, still unbelieving, and not sure who she was crying out for. Bad Wolf growled within her.
The figure inching closer and coming into focus was not her Doctor, her husband, whose mind was a warm purr in hers, like a contented cat on her mum's windowsill. But this other, he was the Doctor - the other version of him, past or present or future she had no idea. Timey wimey and all that rubbish. But he was the one who had spoken to her, when she was ripping through universes.
Thin and lanky and all done up in tweed with mad hair, familiar but not at all the same. He’d been standing outside of a wedding reception when she’d run out of the Void and into a hallway. He’d looked straight at her and she’d remembered his eyes - though they were green, not blue or brown. “It’s not the right time, Rose Tyler.” A mad, sad grin, but not the one she longed for. Still, very him. Some things never changed. She’d wanted to stay. She’d seen, from a distance, almost every incarnation of him. The crickety one. The mad angry man in the impossibly awful coat. The poet. The schemer. The one who played a recorder. She’d seen them laugh and bluster and run, always running, with some friend at their side. The girl with the alien eyes and the sixties hair with the white-haired Doctor had seen her once and spoken as those eyes flashed gold, “It’s not time yet for the Bad Wolf.” She’d jumped away quickly, scared as she hadn’t been in years. But this tweed Doctor with the bow tie, he’d been the only Doctor to see her, speak to her. He’d known who she was. He came after.
She could feel him in her mind as well, and it was bloody well hard enough getting used to her husband being there, and then their two kids on top of that, not to mention the Wolf that was her and not her. Adding anyone else was just too bloody crowded!
Just to add the vinegar, this one's mind was a discordant note, far too close in tone to her Doctor, but full of such deep pain and sorrow that her eyes were already tearing up.
Without realizing what she was doing, she stepped forward, one step - two - and then she began to run. Loping really, the wolf howling in pain and triumph and worry. Her husband followed after a moment, and she wasn't sure if he was chasing her to stop her or trying to get to this other version of himself first. If she could too could feel the pain, he had to be drowning in it.
Pain. He needs…I'm always yours, but he needs…
…go, I understand.
This one was thin as a reed, worse than hers, but with big hair, curled at the front like a great big geek, and enough chin to sharpen an axe on. And he wore tweed, a battered bow tie, and then there was the cowboy hat. Odd, but somehow so very Doctor. And he needed someone. She didn't bother slowing down or taking no for an answer, she flung herself at him and embraced him, taking his weight as he almost collapsed into her arms, his frame so frail and light she thought one good puff of air would send him sailing back into that great abyss behind him. The wolf throbbed golden at the edges of her mind, whimpering in concern.
"Rose Tyler…" he whispered, his voice gravelly. He still said her name just so, but it lacked the touch of awe that she'd heard from her own two Doctors. He knew her, but at a distance. The next Doctor, or even one after that. How long had it been?
"Three hundred forty six years, one month, two days and seventeen point three hours, and you’re still so beautiful," he grinned at her, finally returning her embrace before stepping back, heaving for breath. Of course he could hear her thoughts, drat him. With his respiratory bypass still functioning, she wondered at what he'd been through to be short of breath - something very rare in her two years with the Time Lord.
"Three hundred forty six years…." She swallowed. A lifetime. Her own Doctor skittered to a halt, staring with wide brown eyes at his new face - the one he would never have. His mind felt uneasy, running too fast her to quite comprehend, Bad Wolf augments or no. He surely could see the timelines bending around the three of them in ways she couldn't even imagine.
Her husband was gasping a bit for breath when he finally spoke, "Eleven years, two months, eight days and three point six hours." He looked at Rose with a smile, "Two children, a baby TARDIS, and a house with doors as well. No carpets or mortgage though - we're rather well off at that." He jammed his hands in the pockets of his khakis and smiled smugly at the alien who had given Rose up.
"Still rude and not ginger, just like me," the Time Lord laughed, but that turned into a cough, and swirls of golden light crept through the gaps between his fingers as he covered his mouth with his hand.
"You're dying again!" Rose cried out, suddenly terrified.
"Oi, I just breeze through these faces like nothing, don't I? I…you've only got twelve you know!" Rose looked at her husband and the lines in his forehead revealed just how worried he really was for the other Doctor.
A sorrowful laugh creaked out of the throat of the Time Lord. "She gave me more, you know, gave me all of hers left. I don't know if I'll ever die now." His eyes were dry, but Rose was very suspicious that the only reason he wasn't crying is because he had no tears left in him.
"Who did, Doctor? Who gave you more.."
"River Song." The human Doctor whispered, his eyes wide. "She really did know your name, was going to be….?"
Rose blinked, a flash of jealousy flaring bright in her mind before both she and her Wolf crushed it under a mental heel. She remembered the other wolf. The voice that laid claim to one Doctor, while assuring her that the man who would become her husband was hers. She’d always wondered if her dream was a fantasy of her quasi-regeneration, or seeing within the Bad Wolf. Now she knew. "River Song, your wife, she was a Time Lady?"
The Time Lord smiled sadly, looking at her with green eyes that she instantly recognizes and yet are completely unfamiliar. "You always were terribly brilliant, Rose Tyler." He sighed softly. "Yes, River Song, through a series of incredible events, was a bit of a Time Lady. The very last one. And yes, she's…she was my wife." His voice was hoarse and he coughed golden sparks again. Rose could feel the wolf respond to the flavor of that energy, whimpering sadly on the edges of her soul as the Doctor muttered sadly, "My wonderful, mad, backwards wife."
"…who I…you…we met the day she died," her doctor blurted out and Rose glared at her husband for being rude once again, but she already knew the story. Her dream and that fractured tale had given her hope that the Time Lord who'd left her on that beach in Bad Wolf Bay would not be entirely alone once Donna was gone.
The fully-Time Lord Doctor turned an oddly exultant smile at them both as his eyes glittered that unknown green, "Yes, but you see, I'd already seen the ending - the part that breaks me. It let me revel in the rest, the juicy middle, the rapturously clever and horrible beginning. It let me love her, because I had already thought I lost her. But I haven't lost all of her."
In a burst of frenetic energy, he unslung the backpack he'd been wearing and placed it on to the sandy ground with infinite care, like it contained the most precious items in the universe. Perhaps it did. His fingers went to the zip - long fingers that were different and yet eerily similar to those of her husband.
Her husband had other things on his mind, "Where did you ever find a backpack in the shape of your TARDIS?"
Rose blinked and yes, in fact, the backpack was a blue police box. "Oh, we're terribly famous on Starvane VI, I'll have you know. They seem to be rather immune to perception filters and River and I did manage to cure that nasty plague and defeat those terrorists in one fell swoop!" The new new new Doctor's eyes darted over to their own TARDIS, sitting unimaginative in the distance as a large reddish boulder. "Oh, your chameleon circuits are still working! Brilliant! Still I wouldn't give up my beautiful blue box for all the tea on Starvane VI!"
Rose felt a pang - she missed her old TARDIS with a visceral pain, and she knew her Doctor still had nightmares of the wrenching pain of losing his oldest, dearest partner. He said that she was worth the loss, but the new TARDIS just didn't feel the same. Her husband reached out to take her hand, his eyes still locked on the contents of that backpack.
Another cough and a deep steading breath, and the Time Lord looked up at them with a smile like a magician revealing his greatest, most magnificent trick. He pulled a cube of glowing blue out of the pack on the dusty ground. He held it reverently, lovingly, and everywhere his fingers touched, swirls of light seemed to stroke at his fingers in sad whorls and spirals. Rose was mesmerized. In the back of her mind she swore she heard deep feminine laughter, achingly sad - yet not without the slightly trace of hope and curiosity.
Rose saw a trace of awe in the tears that finally escape from the corner of this Doctor's eyes. "This, this is my wife. This is River Song."
Chapter 3
There’d been a rift, you see. Smack dab in the middle of a rock slide on the edges of Trenzalore plain, there’d been a Rift. The Rift’s light set aglow an ancient road sign, leaning haphazardly among the fallen rocks and covered with graffiti.
Hard to miss, that. And so he knew. He knew what he could do. He could smell it in the very air of this cursed place. He was dying, and he had just enough time. Maybe.
Back into the TARDIS once again, perhaps for the last time. She was damaged and her navigation systems were almost completely shriveled, but Sexy could do it this. It had been Emergency Program Omega for a hundred years. As he bumped along with his oldest friend through the time vortex, he clutched the amber in his pocket and felt the burn of his death curling in his liver. The nannites were still contained - but not for long. He would have to regenerate soon. But not before one last trip to see his River.
He remembered this time to turn off the breaks, and he arrived deep in the library core minutes after he’d left, a lifetime ago. He didn’t look at the empty chair. He couldn’t. His sonic wasn’t enough this time to keep her ghost, that’s why he’d given her a special one long ago, made for that precious purpose. But just a sonic wouldn’t do to keep her. Not for what he had planned. He pulled out the Ridelian memory cube and with a couple of quick connections he’d done in his mind twelve thousand six hundred and three times, he downloaded her memories, the last bits of her soul, into his little blue cube, one already infused with psychic protections and a matrix of his own memories of every moment they had shared.
He couldn’t bring her back to life. It was a fixed point, and there was no clever way out - he’d been too stupid in his last life, and far more stupid in this one. But he could give her something profoundly wonderful.
Back to the TARDIS and full reverse, and sparks lit the console ablaze and nearly blinded him. A hard landing whipped him against a support strut and his ribs pushed hard against his upper right liver, letting him bleed the nanites into his body in a slow trickle that wouldn’t stop until they consumed him.
No time. Never enough time, even if he was the last Time Lord.
He dragged himself out the door, pressing a kiss against the blue panels of the door as he closed them. Three more steps, he checked the zip on his backpack, put one hand on his favorite cowboy hat with the hole River had shot in it one faithful day at Lake Silencio, and he jumped into the Rift with a, “Geronimo!”
What he saw there terrified him. He was no different that what he remembered from so long ago. What he’d run from for countless centuries. This time it surrounded him, seduced him, haunted him, chased him to the edge of madness. Truth and impossibility collided. Lies were sweet and time was merciless. He would be the end of all things - or the beginning. Or both. Or nothing and nothingness. Run. Run. Run!
He was lost. He was nothing. Or everything. He was. Or he wasn’t.
Then, he had fingers. And they clutched at an edge. Maybe he should pull himself up?
He staggered a bit at the top. When reality returned and he was something once again, the pain hit like a 51st century cartoon coyote getting hit with a galactic sized anvil. Twice. Planet Acme was really very unpleasant.
But this wasn’t unpleasant. This planet was impossible.
He smelled the air here. Silver and Galienicium and Forthian desert moss. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen there was a version of Gallifrey that had been untouched. River had told him when she was very young and he was very old, that she would like to be put to rest on Gallifrey. It sounded like the kind of place that she wouldn’t be allowed to rest very long, too much to discover.
Neither of them were fond of resting. Which had often been a very, very good thing.
It had been more than an idle thought. She’d repeated it, over and over again, in the quiet of nights as she grew older and he younger. Not when they were running for their lives, but when they were making happy memories to comfort them both when death came near. From the moment that they met, when their bond was weaving slowly and delicately and impossibly strong. After their marriage, that insane adventure, their bond was strong enough to break slowly, with slippery delicacy that left them both mostly sane until the moment that it would finally fracture. An impossible thing for a Time Lord, much less two. But his River, his brilliant bespoke psychopath, she’d done it. And one day soon - she would no longer fill the emptiness in his mind.
He’d loved her and he had to let her go. And she’d told him where. He’d known when. But how? How was another matter entirely.
Then Rose Tyler ran toward him, an old bond flared to life, throbbing in a different place within the vastness of his mind than the ghost of the bond to his wife. Rose swept him up in her familiar unfamiliar arms and he collapsed into her for a precious eternity, the echoes of a younger mind starbursting in sorrow and exultation at the feel of her again.
His clone - no…his brother was also there, looking at him with far far too much knowledge of precisely how intensely he felt. For years, their unique bond flickered in and out of existence like interuniversal static. He knew that more of his life than he was comfortable with must have been broadcast to this copy of an old self. In the last moments of his regeneration he had felt an echo of his own pain as this other self writhed and screamed a lifetime away.
Now, they shared words, yes. But it was more than that. Loss and joy and pain and pain and pain. His brother may be mostly human, but perhaps that made him understand even more how deeply it hurt to be involved and to care and to risk everything over and over again. And Rose, Rose always saw more of him than anyone else except River. That why he feared her so.
He told them he was dying. Not hard to figure out, what with the coughing and regeneration energy already boiling in his gut.
We go through lives far too quickly, brother. This one will not be easy. There is still the Valeyard…
Yes, yes, brother! I know. I worry. But it cannot be helped. I can’t go throwing myself into a convenient black hole or get my head chopped off when the universe is at risk unless I show up to defuse the Silence and surrender my name.
There was a long mental silence that took no time at all. Understanding like this was almost painful, in that it no longer existed in his universe. It was the rarest, most beautiful thing in existence. It ached.
Do not regenerate in anger, brother. Remember that you are loved.
Rose did not hear all of this, but love was in her eyes as well as her Doctor’s, his impossible brother. He read their timelines, and the beauty of it, the struggle and the bliss of it was too beautiful to stare at for long.
When he pulled River’s cube out of his backpack, it felt right. Those timelines didn’t just shift and flow around the event, they sang. River laughed in his mind, joyful and sad and ever ever curious. "This, this is my wife. This is River Song."
“Your wife!” The mostly-human doctor squealed while Rose simply held her breath, staring at the box with a strange fascination.
Her smile turned wry fairly quickly “I didn’t think it could be done, but really, Doctor, I can’t see you marrying a computer. Who was she?”
He tried to stop the look of desperate sadness that flickered over his face, but his control was at its limits. Rose took a step forward, and he was unable to resist.
“She is…she, she was…” Tears formed and streamed down the Doctor’s face, and Rose took a few more steps, wrapping her arms around the Time Lord and holding him to her, letting him cry into her shoulder. In another moment, he felt his brother’s long arms encase them both, a storm of tears between the lot of them. The bonds he’d resisted for so long flared for a brilliant, impossible moment, full and strong and tying him to this universe in a way that he could not fight. His life, the long long years since he’d been the other man poured through the connection, and he could feel every laugh and flinch and the deep sorrow of both his brother and this woman they loved that he was not there with them. And their lives, full of frustration and hope and brilliant intimacy and the comfort of presence that he could never enjoy, all of that experience filled his hearts almost to overflowing. The one adventure he could never have, now held in his mind in brilliant Technicolor, to be taken out and cherished if he ever survived the battle to come. He broke away, gasping, clutching the cube and knowing that River too, had felt all of that. That she was ready, throbbing in his mind.
“Your TARDIS isn’t quite right, is she?”
His brother answered, scratching his neck and rocking on his heels, staring sharply at River’s cube and listening with intensity that wasn’t human.
And babbling a bit, Still did that. Bad habit, but useful. “It’s an ‘t’. Not a she. That’s the problem. I mean, it should be a she, but she isn’t, she’s an it, which is the problem.”
Rose huffed. “It’s not the same. We go precisely where we set the coordinates. But that’s not always where we need to be.”
He looked at Rose, his hearts beating so fast. “You are brilliant, Rose Tyler. You are so remarkably brilliant for a human. No, wait…” He looked closer. “Not quite human anymore. Not only. Not just.”
She gave him her tongue-touched grin, and he ached with feelings that cracked and bled with remembered need. “I fit better now. And my forever matches his. Helps to have the brain to see what he sees too. Bad Wolf can be dead useful, when the Atraxi are mucking about looking for some mass murderer or there are fish vampires in Amsterdam. Or to know that our Tardis needs to be more, or things here will go pear shaped before long.”
He swallowed the lump in his throat. “Well, my old girl was always a bit insane. Wonderfully so, but that’s why they’d put her in a museum. Uncontrollable, she. Grown from the original, the rumors said, and rumors are usually dead-on right. She…she contains all of them, in a way. Everything. She was also the Bad Wolf. And she gave birth to River, in her fashion. And so…”
He held up a blue cube, with lightning that flared over the surface in phosphorescent green patterns that swirled with a hypnotizing impatience.
“River was meant for more. She is a child of the Tardis.”
His brother blinked at him, already understanding, but unable to react. Rose though, Rose became golden, eternal. Rose became the Bad Wolf once more. She reached out, and touched the cube that was River Song, and he said goodbye to his wife.
Oh, and a plaster is British for a bandaid/bandage.
WHOWHOWHOWHOWHOWHOWHOWHOWHO
"Well?" Rose Tyler-Noble tapped her foot on the metal grating and fixed her husband with an impatient glare, "Aren't we going out?"
Doctor Sean Tyler-Noble stared at the bright white insides of the slightly-too-small doors of their growing TARDIS. "I'm contemplating the methods of removing a plaster. One could take Maya's method of quick and fast, or Matt's slow, methodical wearing away at the adhesive until the thing falls off. Or there's the method on Fasaigi III, where they stand on their heads and…"
"Doctor! You're babbling, which you know I love, but right now…," she gave him a half grin, shaking her head and breathing out a sigh. "With their knack for finding trouble, you can surely study the kids plaster preferences when we are back on Earth. Right now we are here, on Galli…"
"Coordinates 10-0-11-0-0 by 0-2!" the Doctor interrupted quickly. He still could not quite face the name of the planet that he'd destroyed uttering and completely, locked out of time and silenced forever. "There should be nothing here in the Kasterborous System, Rose. Nothing but a black smear of nothingness."
She stroked his arm lovingly, and he had no doubt that she would have taken him into an embrace. He'd have gladly accepted it, returned it, but he felt so poised on the knife's edge of giving up he was loath to get close to her, worried that he'd lose his considerable nerve and drag her back into their bedroom to continue the celebration of their tenth wedding anniversary.
She smiled at him full bore, that tongue between her teeth smile that made him flush with heat. "Naughty, naughty, luv. And if this weren't also our first trip off Earth in the new TARDIS and there was the distinct smell of the Bad Wolf about this entire mess, I'd be more than happy to take you up on the offer…"
"I said that last bit out loud, didn't I?"
"Nah, yer gob isn't to blame this time, luv. My talents seem to be getting better lately, and you weren't exactly thinking quiet-like. And those beautiful eyes weren't exactly focused on my face!"
He blushed pink, something that the full-Time Lord Doctor never would have had to deal with, but something he'd grown resigned to. Especially when Rose giggled and blushed right back at him, despite eleven years of exploring every inch of each other, acres of skins and miles of mind alike. He felt like in her, he'd traversed another universe just as vast and amazing as in all his many regenerations before he'd ever known her. He still ached in sadness for his other self who'd lost her. And sometimes in fear what he could still lose her.
‘I'd stay with you. You know that. You are my forever.’
It was faint, but her thoughts were a clear sweet stream in the caverns of his empty mind, filling him with hope and happiness. Where once he'd been so utterly alone, he had his Rose, and though still on Earth, in another galaxy, Maya and Matthew were bright dots of restless energy, tied to him through more than bonds of blood, but love like he'd never known.
‘Thank you so much, my Rose.’
She tilted her head at him with a smile, and he pressed a kiss to her lips, drawing from her own indomitable courage.
"Well then, wife of mine. Shall we go out and see if we can find trouble?"
"Allons-y!" she declared in her atrocious French, but he wrinkled his nose and pushed open the doors, ducked his head and stepped out into a landscape that really shouldn't be there at all.
The pebbles under his feet felt the same as they had when he was newly loomed. The squeeze of Rose's hand in his was the only thing keeping him tethered to reality as they both took in the view of the silver-leaved trees than chimed softly in the dry breeze of an orange-gold double sunrise.
“Empty,” his voice was a mix of sorrow and awe and loneliness so ancient and profound that it was simply more than human.
“But at least something's here. And who knows what happens in its future? We haven’t mapped…,” Rose stopped suddenly and shook her head, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her cheek against his shoulder. “I’m glad I could see it. I’m glad that we came. It truly is a beautiful planet."
He tipped his head to rest against his wife’s dark blonde hair and looked out toward what would have been called the Mountains of Solace and Solitude. No judgmental Council to pity him his newfound demi-humanity, no Citadel, no Academy, no Eye of Harmony, no Untempered….was there? He swallowed thickly, and for a moment he was filled to the brim with the desire to climb back into their far too smooth and stable baby TARDIS and run back to the simple pleasures of Pete’s World and their two clever, troublemaking children.
In another universe, in another lifetime, he’d looked out into the Untempered Schism and into the Time Vortex, and he’d been filled, hearts and soul, with that desire to run that had made him the rogue Time Lord, an object of alternating derision and fear - and ultimately the death of his people as his world. He walked toward where it had once glimmered in shades of impossible infrared and glaring ultraviolet, hovered there and not there in the way that drew you in until you were forced to confront the impossible nature of reality.
“Where are we going, Doctor?” her voice was falsely calm, but she stared at the glowing edges of the sky before them with a fearless resolution that made her the most beautiful thing in his universe.
He paused. Both he and Rose were more than human. He still part-Time Lord, and she altered by the Bad Wolf. But could either of them survive looking into the Untempered Schism? Would they collapse in death, or share insanity?
"I ran away from a tear in reality once. Just as I've run my entire life - until I chose you," he took a deep breath, but she knew him too well.
"The Untempered Schism. It exists in this universe?" Her voice was filled with awe and she stepped forward, seemingly drawn to it just as much as he was. And why not? If she was still part of whatever Bad Wolf was, what better home for such an entity than the heart of madness that had always lain at the core of Gallifreyan identity?
"It shouldn't. I thought I'd destroyed it all, wiped everything out of creation across every conceivable…"
She put a finger to his lips, "Shush. You may be the Oncoming Storm and the Dealer of Death and whatnot, but you are not all powerful. You did what you had to save a universe. But this is another universe entirely."
He nodded, the argument an old one between them. "A new beginning."
His eyes caught sight of movement and they narrowed in suspicion. There was a figure crawling out of the edge of the Schism. Impossible. "The TARDIS showed no sentient life signs on this planet."
"Well, it did the best it could. It still seems rather hollow though. Something's missing. It could have…"
"The scanners are fully functional. He wasn't there a few minutes ago."
She followed his line of sight and gasped. "Doctor!"
"Oh, it must be bad. Things always go cock-eyed when I'm wearing a cowboy hat. And a cowboy hat with a bow tie! And tweed. I bet he even wears braces. What is this one thinking?”
Chapter 2
The Bad Wolf had been pawing at the edges of her mind for week, leaving her restless and more than eager for their first trip on the new TARDIS, even if it didn't feel quite right yet. Her wolf had been quiet for years, with the exceptions of an odd congratulatory growl of smug pride at the birth of each of their children, the wolf had been quiet. She'd once felt that her mind would never be entirely human again, as Bad Wolf had nipped at her heels and scratched at her dreams constantly through the years she'd spent separate from her Doctor by a universe. It was the Bad Wolf that let her survive the Cannon over and over. The Bad Wolf that let her survive what a normal human could not. She'd thought that would be enough, when she found him, to make her a suitable mate for a Time Lord, that being more than human would make her enough for him. But she'd never gotten the chance to tell him before he'd dumped her back in Pete's World with himself.
But her wolf had been silent then, content with the result, and that as much as anything had let her start to truly believe that the copy - the half human Doctor that became her friend, then her lover, and then her husband in a whirlwind of fights and marathon shags and brilliant swirling emotion - her partner was also truly her Doctor.
The past weeks of restlessness, the wolf songs on the radio. The werewolf sightings in Scotland. That popularity of the terrible movie series with the sparkly werewolves and the half-naked vampires. The odd golden glow in her daughter Maya's eyes. Something was up.
She felt the throb in that more-than-human part of her mind even before she'd followed the Doctor's gaze toward that shimmering, almost painfully attractive light. Then her eyes fell on the figure staggering on unsteady thin legs at the edge of the chasm - no, the Schism. The Untempered Schism that the Doctor had whispered about in the dark of the night when they lay together, too close to tell where one ended and one began, and he told her the secrets that lay in the dark of his eyes in every incarnation.
No one should survive that. No one could have climbed out of that.
But the Doctor had. Of course he had, the blighter.
"Doctor!" she cried, still unbelieving, and not sure who she was crying out for. Bad Wolf growled within her.
The figure inching closer and coming into focus was not her Doctor, her husband, whose mind was a warm purr in hers, like a contented cat on her mum's windowsill. But this other, he was the Doctor - the other version of him, past or present or future she had no idea. Timey wimey and all that rubbish. But he was the one who had spoken to her, when she was ripping through universes.
Thin and lanky and all done up in tweed with mad hair, familiar but not at all the same. He’d been standing outside of a wedding reception when she’d run out of the Void and into a hallway. He’d looked straight at her and she’d remembered his eyes - though they were green, not blue or brown. “It’s not the right time, Rose Tyler.” A mad, sad grin, but not the one she longed for. Still, very him. Some things never changed. She’d wanted to stay. She’d seen, from a distance, almost every incarnation of him. The crickety one. The mad angry man in the impossibly awful coat. The poet. The schemer. The one who played a recorder. She’d seen them laugh and bluster and run, always running, with some friend at their side. The girl with the alien eyes and the sixties hair with the white-haired Doctor had seen her once and spoken as those eyes flashed gold, “It’s not time yet for the Bad Wolf.” She’d jumped away quickly, scared as she hadn’t been in years. But this tweed Doctor with the bow tie, he’d been the only Doctor to see her, speak to her. He’d known who she was. He came after.
She could feel him in her mind as well, and it was bloody well hard enough getting used to her husband being there, and then their two kids on top of that, not to mention the Wolf that was her and not her. Adding anyone else was just too bloody crowded!
Just to add the vinegar, this one's mind was a discordant note, far too close in tone to her Doctor, but full of such deep pain and sorrow that her eyes were already tearing up.
Without realizing what she was doing, she stepped forward, one step - two - and then she began to run. Loping really, the wolf howling in pain and triumph and worry. Her husband followed after a moment, and she wasn't sure if he was chasing her to stop her or trying to get to this other version of himself first. If she could too could feel the pain, he had to be drowning in it.
Pain. He needs…I'm always yours, but he needs…
…go, I understand.
This one was thin as a reed, worse than hers, but with big hair, curled at the front like a great big geek, and enough chin to sharpen an axe on. And he wore tweed, a battered bow tie, and then there was the cowboy hat. Odd, but somehow so very Doctor. And he needed someone. She didn't bother slowing down or taking no for an answer, she flung herself at him and embraced him, taking his weight as he almost collapsed into her arms, his frame so frail and light she thought one good puff of air would send him sailing back into that great abyss behind him. The wolf throbbed golden at the edges of her mind, whimpering in concern.
"Rose Tyler…" he whispered, his voice gravelly. He still said her name just so, but it lacked the touch of awe that she'd heard from her own two Doctors. He knew her, but at a distance. The next Doctor, or even one after that. How long had it been?
"Three hundred forty six years, one month, two days and seventeen point three hours, and you’re still so beautiful," he grinned at her, finally returning her embrace before stepping back, heaving for breath. Of course he could hear her thoughts, drat him. With his respiratory bypass still functioning, she wondered at what he'd been through to be short of breath - something very rare in her two years with the Time Lord.
"Three hundred forty six years…." She swallowed. A lifetime. Her own Doctor skittered to a halt, staring with wide brown eyes at his new face - the one he would never have. His mind felt uneasy, running too fast her to quite comprehend, Bad Wolf augments or no. He surely could see the timelines bending around the three of them in ways she couldn't even imagine.
Her husband was gasping a bit for breath when he finally spoke, "Eleven years, two months, eight days and three point six hours." He looked at Rose with a smile, "Two children, a baby TARDIS, and a house with doors as well. No carpets or mortgage though - we're rather well off at that." He jammed his hands in the pockets of his khakis and smiled smugly at the alien who had given Rose up.
"Still rude and not ginger, just like me," the Time Lord laughed, but that turned into a cough, and swirls of golden light crept through the gaps between his fingers as he covered his mouth with his hand.
"You're dying again!" Rose cried out, suddenly terrified.
"Oi, I just breeze through these faces like nothing, don't I? I…you've only got twelve you know!" Rose looked at her husband and the lines in his forehead revealed just how worried he really was for the other Doctor.
A sorrowful laugh creaked out of the throat of the Time Lord. "She gave me more, you know, gave me all of hers left. I don't know if I'll ever die now." His eyes were dry, but Rose was very suspicious that the only reason he wasn't crying is because he had no tears left in him.
"Who did, Doctor? Who gave you more.."
"River Song." The human Doctor whispered, his eyes wide. "She really did know your name, was going to be….?"
Rose blinked, a flash of jealousy flaring bright in her mind before both she and her Wolf crushed it under a mental heel. She remembered the other wolf. The voice that laid claim to one Doctor, while assuring her that the man who would become her husband was hers. She’d always wondered if her dream was a fantasy of her quasi-regeneration, or seeing within the Bad Wolf. Now she knew. "River Song, your wife, she was a Time Lady?"
The Time Lord smiled sadly, looking at her with green eyes that she instantly recognizes and yet are completely unfamiliar. "You always were terribly brilliant, Rose Tyler." He sighed softly. "Yes, River Song, through a series of incredible events, was a bit of a Time Lady. The very last one. And yes, she's…she was my wife." His voice was hoarse and he coughed golden sparks again. Rose could feel the wolf respond to the flavor of that energy, whimpering sadly on the edges of her soul as the Doctor muttered sadly, "My wonderful, mad, backwards wife."
"…who I…you…we met the day she died," her doctor blurted out and Rose glared at her husband for being rude once again, but she already knew the story. Her dream and that fractured tale had given her hope that the Time Lord who'd left her on that beach in Bad Wolf Bay would not be entirely alone once Donna was gone.
The fully-Time Lord Doctor turned an oddly exultant smile at them both as his eyes glittered that unknown green, "Yes, but you see, I'd already seen the ending - the part that breaks me. It let me revel in the rest, the juicy middle, the rapturously clever and horrible beginning. It let me love her, because I had already thought I lost her. But I haven't lost all of her."
In a burst of frenetic energy, he unslung the backpack he'd been wearing and placed it on to the sandy ground with infinite care, like it contained the most precious items in the universe. Perhaps it did. His fingers went to the zip - long fingers that were different and yet eerily similar to those of her husband.
Her husband had other things on his mind, "Where did you ever find a backpack in the shape of your TARDIS?"
Rose blinked and yes, in fact, the backpack was a blue police box. "Oh, we're terribly famous on Starvane VI, I'll have you know. They seem to be rather immune to perception filters and River and I did manage to cure that nasty plague and defeat those terrorists in one fell swoop!" The new new new Doctor's eyes darted over to their own TARDIS, sitting unimaginative in the distance as a large reddish boulder. "Oh, your chameleon circuits are still working! Brilliant! Still I wouldn't give up my beautiful blue box for all the tea on Starvane VI!"
Rose felt a pang - she missed her old TARDIS with a visceral pain, and she knew her Doctor still had nightmares of the wrenching pain of losing his oldest, dearest partner. He said that she was worth the loss, but the new TARDIS just didn't feel the same. Her husband reached out to take her hand, his eyes still locked on the contents of that backpack.
Another cough and a deep steading breath, and the Time Lord looked up at them with a smile like a magician revealing his greatest, most magnificent trick. He pulled a cube of glowing blue out of the pack on the dusty ground. He held it reverently, lovingly, and everywhere his fingers touched, swirls of light seemed to stroke at his fingers in sad whorls and spirals. Rose was mesmerized. In the back of her mind she swore she heard deep feminine laughter, achingly sad - yet not without the slightly trace of hope and curiosity.
Rose saw a trace of awe in the tears that finally escape from the corner of this Doctor's eyes. "This, this is my wife. This is River Song."
Chapter 3
There’d been a rift, you see. Smack dab in the middle of a rock slide on the edges of Trenzalore plain, there’d been a Rift. The Rift’s light set aglow an ancient road sign, leaning haphazardly among the fallen rocks and covered with graffiti.
Hard to miss, that. And so he knew. He knew what he could do. He could smell it in the very air of this cursed place. He was dying, and he had just enough time. Maybe.
Back into the TARDIS once again, perhaps for the last time. She was damaged and her navigation systems were almost completely shriveled, but Sexy could do it this. It had been Emergency Program Omega for a hundred years. As he bumped along with his oldest friend through the time vortex, he clutched the amber in his pocket and felt the burn of his death curling in his liver. The nannites were still contained - but not for long. He would have to regenerate soon. But not before one last trip to see his River.
He remembered this time to turn off the breaks, and he arrived deep in the library core minutes after he’d left, a lifetime ago. He didn’t look at the empty chair. He couldn’t. His sonic wasn’t enough this time to keep her ghost, that’s why he’d given her a special one long ago, made for that precious purpose. But just a sonic wouldn’t do to keep her. Not for what he had planned. He pulled out the Ridelian memory cube and with a couple of quick connections he’d done in his mind twelve thousand six hundred and three times, he downloaded her memories, the last bits of her soul, into his little blue cube, one already infused with psychic protections and a matrix of his own memories of every moment they had shared.
He couldn’t bring her back to life. It was a fixed point, and there was no clever way out - he’d been too stupid in his last life, and far more stupid in this one. But he could give her something profoundly wonderful.
Back to the TARDIS and full reverse, and sparks lit the console ablaze and nearly blinded him. A hard landing whipped him against a support strut and his ribs pushed hard against his upper right liver, letting him bleed the nanites into his body in a slow trickle that wouldn’t stop until they consumed him.
No time. Never enough time, even if he was the last Time Lord.
He dragged himself out the door, pressing a kiss against the blue panels of the door as he closed them. Three more steps, he checked the zip on his backpack, put one hand on his favorite cowboy hat with the hole River had shot in it one faithful day at Lake Silencio, and he jumped into the Rift with a, “Geronimo!”
What he saw there terrified him. He was no different that what he remembered from so long ago. What he’d run from for countless centuries. This time it surrounded him, seduced him, haunted him, chased him to the edge of madness. Truth and impossibility collided. Lies were sweet and time was merciless. He would be the end of all things - or the beginning. Or both. Or nothing and nothingness. Run. Run. Run!
He was lost. He was nothing. Or everything. He was. Or he wasn’t.
Then, he had fingers. And they clutched at an edge. Maybe he should pull himself up?
He staggered a bit at the top. When reality returned and he was something once again, the pain hit like a 51st century cartoon coyote getting hit with a galactic sized anvil. Twice. Planet Acme was really very unpleasant.
But this wasn’t unpleasant. This planet was impossible.
He smelled the air here. Silver and Galienicium and Forthian desert moss. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen there was a version of Gallifrey that had been untouched. River had told him when she was very young and he was very old, that she would like to be put to rest on Gallifrey. It sounded like the kind of place that she wouldn’t be allowed to rest very long, too much to discover.
Neither of them were fond of resting. Which had often been a very, very good thing.
It had been more than an idle thought. She’d repeated it, over and over again, in the quiet of nights as she grew older and he younger. Not when they were running for their lives, but when they were making happy memories to comfort them both when death came near. From the moment that they met, when their bond was weaving slowly and delicately and impossibly strong. After their marriage, that insane adventure, their bond was strong enough to break slowly, with slippery delicacy that left them both mostly sane until the moment that it would finally fracture. An impossible thing for a Time Lord, much less two. But his River, his brilliant bespoke psychopath, she’d done it. And one day soon - she would no longer fill the emptiness in his mind.
He’d loved her and he had to let her go. And she’d told him where. He’d known when. But how? How was another matter entirely.
Then Rose Tyler ran toward him, an old bond flared to life, throbbing in a different place within the vastness of his mind than the ghost of the bond to his wife. Rose swept him up in her familiar unfamiliar arms and he collapsed into her for a precious eternity, the echoes of a younger mind starbursting in sorrow and exultation at the feel of her again.
His clone - no…his brother was also there, looking at him with far far too much knowledge of precisely how intensely he felt. For years, their unique bond flickered in and out of existence like interuniversal static. He knew that more of his life than he was comfortable with must have been broadcast to this copy of an old self. In the last moments of his regeneration he had felt an echo of his own pain as this other self writhed and screamed a lifetime away.
Now, they shared words, yes. But it was more than that. Loss and joy and pain and pain and pain. His brother may be mostly human, but perhaps that made him understand even more how deeply it hurt to be involved and to care and to risk everything over and over again. And Rose, Rose always saw more of him than anyone else except River. That why he feared her so.
He told them he was dying. Not hard to figure out, what with the coughing and regeneration energy already boiling in his gut.
We go through lives far too quickly, brother. This one will not be easy. There is still the Valeyard…
Yes, yes, brother! I know. I worry. But it cannot be helped. I can’t go throwing myself into a convenient black hole or get my head chopped off when the universe is at risk unless I show up to defuse the Silence and surrender my name.
There was a long mental silence that took no time at all. Understanding like this was almost painful, in that it no longer existed in his universe. It was the rarest, most beautiful thing in existence. It ached.
Do not regenerate in anger, brother. Remember that you are loved.
Rose did not hear all of this, but love was in her eyes as well as her Doctor’s, his impossible brother. He read their timelines, and the beauty of it, the struggle and the bliss of it was too beautiful to stare at for long.
When he pulled River’s cube out of his backpack, it felt right. Those timelines didn’t just shift and flow around the event, they sang. River laughed in his mind, joyful and sad and ever ever curious. "This, this is my wife. This is River Song."
“Your wife!” The mostly-human doctor squealed while Rose simply held her breath, staring at the box with a strange fascination.
Her smile turned wry fairly quickly “I didn’t think it could be done, but really, Doctor, I can’t see you marrying a computer. Who was she?”
He tried to stop the look of desperate sadness that flickered over his face, but his control was at its limits. Rose took a step forward, and he was unable to resist.
“She is…she, she was…” Tears formed and streamed down the Doctor’s face, and Rose took a few more steps, wrapping her arms around the Time Lord and holding him to her, letting him cry into her shoulder. In another moment, he felt his brother’s long arms encase them both, a storm of tears between the lot of them. The bonds he’d resisted for so long flared for a brilliant, impossible moment, full and strong and tying him to this universe in a way that he could not fight. His life, the long long years since he’d been the other man poured through the connection, and he could feel every laugh and flinch and the deep sorrow of both his brother and this woman they loved that he was not there with them. And their lives, full of frustration and hope and brilliant intimacy and the comfort of presence that he could never enjoy, all of that experience filled his hearts almost to overflowing. The one adventure he could never have, now held in his mind in brilliant Technicolor, to be taken out and cherished if he ever survived the battle to come. He broke away, gasping, clutching the cube and knowing that River too, had felt all of that. That she was ready, throbbing in his mind.
“Your TARDIS isn’t quite right, is she?”
His brother answered, scratching his neck and rocking on his heels, staring sharply at River’s cube and listening with intensity that wasn’t human.
And babbling a bit, Still did that. Bad habit, but useful. “It’s an ‘t’. Not a she. That’s the problem. I mean, it should be a she, but she isn’t, she’s an it, which is the problem.”
Rose huffed. “It’s not the same. We go precisely where we set the coordinates. But that’s not always where we need to be.”
He looked at Rose, his hearts beating so fast. “You are brilliant, Rose Tyler. You are so remarkably brilliant for a human. No, wait…” He looked closer. “Not quite human anymore. Not only. Not just.”
She gave him her tongue-touched grin, and he ached with feelings that cracked and bled with remembered need. “I fit better now. And my forever matches his. Helps to have the brain to see what he sees too. Bad Wolf can be dead useful, when the Atraxi are mucking about looking for some mass murderer or there are fish vampires in Amsterdam. Or to know that our Tardis needs to be more, or things here will go pear shaped before long.”
He swallowed the lump in his throat. “Well, my old girl was always a bit insane. Wonderfully so, but that’s why they’d put her in a museum. Uncontrollable, she. Grown from the original, the rumors said, and rumors are usually dead-on right. She…she contains all of them, in a way. Everything. She was also the Bad Wolf. And she gave birth to River, in her fashion. And so…”
He held up a blue cube, with lightning that flared over the surface in phosphorescent green patterns that swirled with a hypnotizing impatience.
“River was meant for more. She is a child of the Tardis.”
His brother blinked at him, already understanding, but unable to react. Rose though, Rose became golden, eternal. Rose became the Bad Wolf once more. She reached out, and touched the cube that was River Song, and he said goodbye to his wife.