Echoes of Summer - Chapter Forty-One: The Wolf at the Door (Part II)
Disclaimer: Neither Doctor Who nor any characters, items or materials of any kind pertaining to Doctor Who or the Whoniverse belong to me. I’m just looking for a good time. Hee. Trying them out for a bit, see how they fit.
Plot Summary: He was left with his lips against her jaw, her figure pressed to him as if she belonged there. One of many moments between the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler after he breaks his own rules to retrieve her from Bad Wolf Bay. The walls between worlds begin to fall, two different realities merging. And on the horizon a threat rises that threatens to destroy everything the Doctor holds dear.
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Beta: bratflorida
Rating: Starts at PG. Runs the gamut straight through to NC-17.
Spoilers: Oh yes. Series One through Series 4 Specials.
Timeline: AU after the end of Series 2. Spoilers up to, including and going past Series 4 though. I’ve seen all of Series 1 through 4, including the series 4 specials but am not very familiar with the Classic Who much. As such, if I happen to include anything that really touches upon Classic Who, other than it being unintentional, I’ll be surprised out of my head. Really. You’ll probably see a lot of familiar things in the fic that play into the series of DW. Bear with me, it all ties in together.
Chapter Forty One - The Wolf at the Door (Part I)
Chapter Forty-One: The Wolf at the Door (Part II):
“You can’t change them anymore. Not in this branching line. It’s gone too far, too long.” She lifted her head, her eyes trailing across his features and he felt the heat of her gaze as it passed over his features as if she branded him. “And no one can blame you. Not for what has happened.”
He frowned gently, his lips moving to part.
“My Doctor,” she murmured. At her possessive term for him, his eyes opened and Rose gazed back at him, her smile curling her lips faintly. “My lonely Doctor.”
He returned her stare, his dark eyes darting back and forth between hers, seeing her so deep in those hazel summer eyes. Seeing everything they had ever been together, everything they had ever meant to each other. All those moments they had spent together, running hand in hand. He saw city lights behind her eyes, of a cold night not too long ago that she had left the TARDIS to walk in miserable silence, to lose herself in the city. To see a couple running and remembering when she had run with her Doctor. That same night, a vision of her Doctor finding her, of him finding her in the park on a bench and tripping over words to express what he felt for her. Such a long time ago.
And visions of a human man named John Smith. Of John Smith falling in love with his maid, of not understanding why she couldn’t love him in return. He had been a simple man, this John Smith. But he had loved her with all his heart and she had still denied him, denied his kiss, his very affection. He had realized why later, but only once John Smith had reverted back into the Doctor. John Smith would not have understood her denial, the reasons she had always turned from him. The Doctor, however, had. Looking back on that now he realized how foolish he had been, pushing away this girl who had been at his side for so long.
“You…know,” he whispered, a frown creasing his forehead.
She nodded faintly. “I was there. I am her. The girl that was there through it all, at your side, she is me. We are the same.”
He stared at her, assessing her words, her very manner. Rose Tyler as the Bad Wolf. The Bad Wolf as Rose Tyler. One would always circle into the other. This version of Rose Tyler would always be destined to be the Bad Wolf. There was never going to be another end for her. “But…you…you’re-“
She smiled softly, knowingly. “Paradox personified,” she whispered. She raised her eyes, lifting them to the ceiling of the TARDIS and then letting them float over everything in the console room. “It’s the great question, isn’t it?” she mused. “If the Bad Wolf was created on Satellite 5 because of mere words recognized throughout London, Cardiff, in the past, in the future…then who is the creator?”
He frowned at her. “I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself,’” he said quietly, echoing her words from such a long time ago.
Her eyes seemed to gleam. “Yes. I create myself once more. One endless loop through time. But only in this timeline.”
The Doctor’s expression turned questioning. “It’s the same timeline. The same-“
The woman before him lifted her hand, causing him to recoil faintly. But she did nothing except wave her palm over his eyes, a single gesture.
He felt it then as if a block had been before him, hindering his vision. He felt his eyes widen, felt his mind clear. The clarity gave way to anger as he looked around his console, as he saw everything he had not seen before. The console room was shifting in and out of being, red light flashing erratically from the core. To his right he caught the smallest glimpses of the world outside the TARDIS as if no wall existed there and he saw the people of London. Then the air shimmered and the wall was there once more. To his left, as he turned his head, the TARDIS doors burst open and he saw the faintest image of Jack Harkness, dirty and bloodied, a rifle in hand as he entered the TARDIS and merely rested against the door wearily. A moment after that he faded away into nothingness, leaving the Doctor heaving in confusion.
“What have you done to me?” he asked the Bad Wolf frantically.
“See it and hear it for what it is at last,” she ordered him. “See the timelines cross. See the tears and their consequences. See everything. Let the wall fall from you.”
And it did. The mere weight of the damage threatened to consume him as all around he saw just what was happening at last. The images that Rose must have been catching glimpses of all this time, magnified by his ability to see futures and pasts. He gaped, seeing visions of Martha Jones as a ghostly version of her appeared beside him suddenly, laughing at something he couldn’t see or hear. He recoiled as he watched her, grasping her image in his head and holding onto it as she turned on her heel and floated off to the back rooms of the TARDIS. Only to have Donna Noble emerge suddenly, holding a deep purple dress in her hand and mouthing a question in his direction, one he couldn’t understand because he heard mental voices as well, as if he had linked himself telepathically with every person appearing in his console room.
“Did you never wonder?” the golden woman before him asked, observing him as he stared at Donna, as he heaved erratically at the information overload. Her voice was fluid, gentle, as he strained rigidly in contrast against everything happening around him. She seemed unaffected by it all, even as Donna came up the ramp, phasing completely through the golden woman as if she didn’t exist. Passing through him as if he hadn’t physically stood there. “Did you never question it?” The Bad Wolf asked him. “Why you couldn’t see the things she saw? The things…I saw? Did you never wonder what it is she ran from, always?”
He shuddered from Donna’s incorporeal form, understanding then deep inside. He saw her truth in her words. “All those lives…” he uttered, shaking his head, eyes trained on Donna over his shoulder as she vanished into nothingness. “All those mistakes.” He swallowed, his throat dry. “H-how…are you even here?” he whispered, shaking his head in confusion.
She tilted her head slightly, eyes moving around the room once more. The shifting of the TARDIS was echoed in her eyes, flashing across those amber irises. Behind her he appeared suddenly, a double of himself standing before the console. He threw his head back as regeneration energy burst from his figure, lighting the room gold. “I created myself,” she was answering him from a distance, seemingly well aware of what was occurring behind her. “And in doing so, I corrupted the TARDIS. I have-“
“You can’t corrupt the TARDIS,” he cut her off, staring at the image of his double as he vanished away before his regeneration had been completed. “You are the TARDIS. Right now! Currently, as the Bad Wolf, you are the TARDIS! The energies of the heart, in a human form-”
“I am unfinished,” she said faintly. “I was interrupted from consuming the entire heart. By your future self.”
He stared at her, lips parted.
With a small sigh coming from her lips, she reached out toward him. He fought himself from shying away, instead holding himself still as she pressed a gentle fingertip to the middle of his forehead.
His eyes shut instinctively as a vision swirled to life before him, a vision of a wavering figure standing before the TARDIS console, the heart spilling out into the room. A vision of Rose, head thrown back as the energies of the time vortex overwhelmed her. A vision of a second figure appearing, his frame blocking the light of the vortex. Angrily, the second figure took hold of Rose by the shoulder and shoved her backward with inhuman strength, flinging her aside as if she were nothing more than a rag doll. She crashed to the grated floor of the console with a muffled shout, wincing. And even as the second figure closed the hatch to the heart of the TARDIS, he recognized himself. But he did not recognize the wild expression on his double’s face, the fury that became sorrow as he whirled toward Rose on the floor.
Neither did she, it seemed to him, as she scampered away from him on her hands and rear, golden light flaring from her eyes, from her very form. His double had taken all of a single step toward her before she dissipated into golden smoke and vanished from the console room.
“My abilities as the Bad Wolf are hampered,” the woman explained to him when he opened his eyes once more, and her own eyes flared as if the fact angered her. “I am, for lack of a better word, incomplete.”
The Doctor lifted a hand to his hair, his wide eyes blank. Searching the room blindly at a loss for words, he could only shake his head in question. “How…did any of this come to pass?” he murmured. A moment later the images were suddenly there then, his mind seeing it all. “Oh. Oh…”
The Bad Wolf merely gazed at him silently. But behind her appeared a hazy vision of her double, her glowing eyes burning with fury as the console room seemed to shift, forming the obscure image of a TARDIS hallway. He could still see the core of his own TARDIS through the likeness of the corridor, his mind threatening to burn.
“You think you can hurt me?” her double raged in the corridor, glowing powerfully, beams of golden lights scattering like light across a diamond’s edge. Drawing away from her was a copy of the blond girl he had seen in the alleyway of the Powell Estates, his daughter. Another figure appeared at his daughter’s side, the spitting image of him, pushing her slight frame behind his to stand before the golden vision of the woman as she shouted at them. “You can’t even touch me!”
Sheer terror racing up and down his spine at being witness to something he was never meant to see, he whispered, “Outside of space and time. Outside the timeline, just at the edge of the void. That’s where you reside. Where you hide yourself. And you knew. All this time and you knew.”
Before him, her furious double vanished away, taking the TARDIS corridor and the images of himself and his daughter. The Bad Wolf cocked her head in disagreement at his words, seemingly quite aware of everything going on around her. “Not…the entire time, no,” she replied slowly.
“No,” he said a moment later in accord, another piece falling into place. “Another paradox. Knowing something because you created it. Because it, in turn, created you with the knowledge. But you knew before the rest of us…did-“ He suddenly squeezed his eyes shut, wincing, wishing to do away with the image of the mad Bad Wolf. A growl came from him and he lifted his hands to his face, rubbing it furiously. “What have you done? This entire…” his voice died off. Every image in his mind was burning, stripping him of the ability to speak. There were suddenly too many of them for him to make any sense of and he let out a small sound as he tried to sort it out, to make sense of it.
She waited for him, her glow lighting the TARDIS floor she stood on, brilliant dust streaming from her.
“You…created a paradox machine,” he whispered in disbelief, catching a vision and holding onto it. He staggered back a step as he looked at her, every single part of him needing, demanding, to be away from her then. “You created it with the remaining energy you left in the TARDIS. My TARDIS! You returned and you corrupted her! You-“ He broke off, stiffening, seeing all the images then. All the outcomes, all the futures that he had never even realized existed. “You…Oh!”
She neared once more even as he lurched to get away from her. “The TARDIS and I are outside of time,” she said to him and he detected the faint hint of desperation in her fluid voice. “When you came for me to the beach, you harnessed the massive energy of a hypernova. The paradox machine is using that energy now, the last traces of it, to maintain this branching timeline. This alternate timeline-“
“Just let it collapse!” he shouted at her frantically, causing her to recoil. He hunched over with a pained growl, a hand pressing to his head as the images came faster, more furiously.
“I am not the deciding factor,” she said to that rapidly, her tone pitching higher and become louder, her figure limp as he stumbled against the rails circling the console. “If I let this timeline collapse there will still be the gaping hole it branched from! The timeline will be open to the void and vice versa. Everything in the void will pass into that timeline-“
“No reapers,” he muttered, wincing as he struggled to assimilate all the images assailing him. “There were never any reapers to fix the timeline, to…to-“
“I am the reaper,” she cut him off. “I hold them at bay. I am sterilizing the wound, attempting-“
“That’s why you’re killing them. Erasing them,” the Doctor whispered and he allowed the railing to maintain him wearily. Heaving for a single breath, he closed his eyes. He knew what he needed to do. He just needed to stop and allow himself to carry those visions, the same as he always did. There were just so many more of them now and they had all flooded into him much too quickly, with too much ferocity. Inhaling deeply, he forced his hearts to slow, his pulse to steady. He could control the visions, could control his thoughts. And even as he was whispering it to himself, he felt the images begin to fall away into the background, his rigid frame beginning to stabilize once more. Opening his eyes, aware that she waited for him still, he fixed her with a cold glare, attempting to remember the train of thought he’d had a moment before. “All those people who came back to see her, in the end they were the wounds in time,” he said slowly, haltingly. “Because…because-“
“He never knew,” she said and her voice was pained. Lost. As the Doctor looked at her in confusion, she shook her head faintly. “It’s why he kept sending them. He couldn’t see what was happening because I didn’t allow him to see. Thinking he was changing the world around him, attempting to cause ripples in a pond. How do you cause a ripple when you stand still?” She shook her head once more, her tone almost apologetic but not quite. “He sent them back, one after the other, never realizing that all he was doing was reinforcing the timeline. Leading me to become the Bad Wolf. I became the Bad Wolf because they always came back with their warnings. Their reassurances.” Her voice became the slightest bit sardonic, her frame brimming with resonating gold dust. “She’s already thought it. The Rose in this time. In your bed.”
The Doctor lifted his head, his jaw clenching at the way she spoke of her former self. “She’s been suffering, having dreams. Of the Bad Wolf. Of you-“
“Someone is always suffering. You can’t help them all,” she whispered mockingly, throwing words he’d only recently said to her back in his face.
His expression told her he’d had quite enough of her behavior and, surprisingly, she settled to listen. “Then the dream came true,” he continued quietly. “When she went through the window. What-“
“An echo,” the Bad Wolf replied swiftly. “An echo of a future trauma resounding backward in time to plague her. To plague me.” And she lifted her hands before her face, gazing at the golden dust as it drifted around her skin. “That’s where it happened. That day. The day of the window. Mere hours ago for you,” she said to him easily. “On the floor, bleeding, and all I could do was stare at my hands. I didn’t understand. But then I saw the picture, the child’s drawing of little red riding hood and the wolf and that’s when it happened. That’s when my world shifted.” Her golden eyes darted toward the door leading to the corridors, leading to his bedroom. “She’s dreaming of it now, of her choice,” she whispered eerily. “Planning. ‘If I become the Bad Wolf again, I can fix it. Whatever is coming, I can fix it. Because I can’t…go…back.’” The expression on her face betrayed her knowledge, her bitterness at her statement. “Once I was revived, I knew what needed to be done. A wound in time needed to be sterilized to prevent this all from happening. But which one?”
The Doctor glared at her angrily. “Shouldn’t you have known?” he bit out wearily. “Shouldn’t you have known which wound had caused it all?”
“I am incomplete,” she said once more, coldly. “If I fix one wound another begins to crack the walls and bleed. But I need the TARDIS to maintain the paradox, to keep this timeline afloat as I sterilize the wounds. If I take more of her she will become an empty shell, useless. And, alone, I cannot do this-“
“You’re a knock off,” the Doctor said to her then, his face dark. “Not Rose Tyler and yet not the Bad Wolf. You’re nothing but-“
The woman silenced him with one fluid gesture, her words sharp. “Be very careful, my Doctor. I would have no problem allowing this timeline to fall into the void to leave the original timeline it stems from defenseless-“
He was not to be threatened however. “It wouldn’t be defenseless. The reapers would return to close the gap. They would-“
“There would be nothing for the reapers to fix,” the Bad Wolf cut him off. “The original timeline would be complete, undamaged. Preserved. Except for the breaches left behind. Breaches you yourself created. Beyond that, the only threat would be the creatures in the void. There would be no wound to sterilize, no repair needed for the timeline-“
“Because the timeline would continue as it should have. As it was meant to,” the Doctor whispered in understanding. “Just…with holes in its walls.” He slumped wearily, understanding then. “But why?” he questioned weakly. “Why come here? To this place and time? Why not just repair the breaches where the timeline branched? Wouldn’t that have saved us all trouble-“
“It was not my decision,” she explained to him. “I do not make the decision to branch the timeline and I do not have the energy required to close the breaches anymore. Not so long as the TARDIS remains as a paradox machine.”
The Doctor stared at her and then turned his head away to laugh mirthlessly. “You’ve created your own paradox all by yourself. Your second, in fact,” he corrected with a shake of his head. “Recreating yourself with just enough power to maintain a mistaken timeline but not enough to fix it. And it’s all for nothing! Because the second you-” He cut himself off then, not wishing to speak his next words.
The Bad Wolf settled into silence, watching him, knowing his words even though he had refused to speak them. “There is always an end,” she murmured faintly. “Everything must come to an end.”
Chapter Forty-One - The Wolf at the Door (Part III)