Fic: Path of Needles (4/7)
Aug. 19th, 2008 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tardis_stowawayTitle: Path of Needles
Author:tardis_stowaway
Characters/Pairings: Chiefly Ten/Rose, but there's also a bit of Nine/Rose (I couldn't resist), and some Ten/Rose/Jack (Jack couldn't resist).
Rating: mild PG-13 for a bit of discussion about sex and one or two instances of salty language.
Spoilers: through season 3, spoiler-free AU after that!
Betas:wendymr and dark_aegis , may the fates smile upon them
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is not mine. I just take it out for play dates with my strange imagination.
Summary: Once upon a time, she had abided in the world where lives did not begin with ‘once upon a time.’ No more. Rose walks through the woods. Meanwhile, the Doctor deals with an abundance of Bad Wolf references.
Back to Chapter 3 on LJ or read the story on Teaspoon
Chapter 4: The Beginning and the End
To every thing there is a season: a time for a girl, and a time for the Bad Wolf; a time of war, and a time of peace; a time to be born, and a time to die.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: There is some slightly shaky canon and some fairly hand-wavey science in this chapter. However, at the end of the chapter I’ve included supporting evidence for one of the stranger ideas.
* * *
“Folk seem to have been just landed in [the tales that really mattered], usually–their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, for turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on–and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end.”
-Samwise Gamgee in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
* * *
“Oh. You’ve come,” said the Doctor. It was not a joyful cry of welcome. His voice was flat and dead as a salt pan. Even the Northern accent could not enliven it.
The Doctor was as she had first met him, only more so. His hair was cropped closer than she’d ever seen it, Auschwitz-short. It emphasized his ears and the immense dark circles under his eyes. He leaned over the console as if his legs alone could not support his weight. Instead of his trademark leather jacket, he wore a green velvet frock coat so poorly fitted that inches of forearm stuck out of the cuffs. A large dark stain marred the fabric over his chest. His trousers did not reach his ankles, and his feet were bare. A pair of shoes lay carelessly on the floor. It didn’t take her long to realize that the metallic smell inside the TARDIS must be dried blood, visible on the Doctor’s clothing and the spatters on the TARDIS’s wooden floor.
Wooden floor? The interior of the TARDIS was nothing like what she knew, full of wood and analog-seeming instruments. Still, the TARDIS-feeling, the sensation of simultaneously setting off and coming home, was the same. The TARDIS’s welcome song trilled through her mind, opening up passages long closed. It was the same TARDIS all right, and she was damaged. There were gaping cracks in the floor, a worrisome wheeze in the engines’ hum, and sparking wires hanging from the ceiling. The TARDIS’s presence in her mind was a little too bright, making Rose wonder if the ship was somehow leaking telepathically.
Rose guessed that this Doctor must come from before he met her, apparently just after regenerating. He’d mentioned once that he’d regenerated during the War, and she saw that war written over every inch of his body and his TARDIS. She ached to go to him, to comfort him and confirm his reality though touch, but if he hadn’t met her then she dared not. Rose wished she were a Time Lord; one heart couldn’t break enough to contain what she felt when she saw her Doctor like that and couldn’t properly ease his pain, not to mention her own long loneliness.
But why did he sound like he was expecting her if they hadn’t met yet? So many things she wanted, needed, to say, but they all withered on the way to her mouth.
“You’ve got big ears,” she accidentally said instead, setting her basket on the floor.
“The better to hear you with, but isn’t that supposed to be your line?” He glanced at her for just an instant, and his eyes burned her like liquid nitrogen.
“What?” Rose asked, confused.
“You’re the Bad Wolf. I don’t know what that means, but the Oracle predicted you back on Delphi–the planet, not the city. She gave us the prophecy to end the war: ‘To kill the weed you must yank out its roots, and if they tangle with the roots of your orchard then you must uproot all. Go to the Howling, and the Bad Wolf will find you.’ Never understood the Wolf part, but that seemed tangential. We traced the timelines back to find the point where we could eliminate the Daleks utterly. The only sure way is to go all the way back to the very beginning of the universe, seed their destruction in the path of the Big Bang itself. The changes abolish Gallifrey just as completely. Couldn’t have that, so the Council waited.
“We waited as planet after planet fell. Only when the first Dalek touched Gallifrey’s own soil did we admit that there was no choice. Sodding Council probably thought they were doing me a favor, letting the rebel child be the one to destroy it all. They’d have picked the Master if he hadn’t already run off. They never understood…but that’s not the point. The point is that I got here–got killed on the way, for what it’s worth–and now I can’t do it. Not can’t bring myself to do it. Can’t physically make it happen.” The Doctor gave his explanation as if talking to himself, looking at the console and not Rose. His voice sagged with weariness, so exhausted he sounded almost unconcerned with the events he related.
“We’re at the beginning of the universe? I thought I was in the Void between parallel universes,” Rose asked, hoping that if she kept him talking she could keep him from shattering any further.
“Same thing. It’s the realm of pure possibility, the birthplace of all universes. In relation to any universe, it’s simultaneously before and between that universe and all others. A bit like how light’s a particle and a wave, only the duality here is in temporal-dimensional location. The Void’s all the matter in the universe packed tight, so indistinguishable that nothing can be said to exist. No time, no space. It’s everything and nothing.” He seemed slightly steadier on his feet when talking technical, but Rose knew that was always true.
“There’s woods out there,” she pointed out. “Miles of paths too. That’s not nothing.”
“Out there, you see whatever your mind makes to try to comprehend. You’re the Bad Wolf, so I suppose woods make sense.” The Doctor frowned, seeming to see her for the first time. The force of his gaze ripped into her, stripped away the eggshell and set the hatchling free. “You don’t look much like any wolf I’ve ever seen.”
The better to love you with, my dear, Rose thought. What she said was, “I haven’t always been a wolf.”
“Oh no,” the Doctor said. “A wolf is a wolf, even when it’s in Red Riding Hood’s clothing.” Before she could really register his approach he was standing beside her, fingering the collar of her red hoodie. The back of his hand brushed against her neck, and it was colder than she’d ever felt it. It was not a companionable gesture. When he approached her, he seemed to seek the Bad Wolf, laying himself bare to the danger. (It’s not the urge to fall but the urge to jump, not the impulse to brave the woods but the yearning to embrace the hunter.)
Rose shivered. He was right. She had always been the Wolf, would always be the Wolf, but that wasn’t the whole story.
“We make our own fairy tales,” she told him.
The mangled sound in the TARDIS’s engines might almost have been a howl. Something within Rose answered, stirring from its den in the deep recesses of her mind. She reached up a small hand and laid it against the Doctor’s face. Somehow, the light welling up from her skin seemed perfectly natural to her.
“You’re glowing,” the Doctor said, awe somehow penetrating his grief.
“I will help you end the War, Doctor. What do we do?” (I am the Bad Wolf.)
Rose was more conscious of herself than she’d been when she opened the heart of the TARDIS on the Game Station. She did not see all of time and space, but the power of the Time Vortex that had never been fully expunged surged within her, enhanced by the leaking energies of the damaged TARDIS.
“I’ve created a program on the TARDIS computer to manipulate energy and time streams to set the universe I come from on a collision course with the possible universe where Daleks could not have come into existence. Daleks and Gallifrey. After the moment that I left the universe to come here, the universes will collide, mix a bit, and bounce apart, leaving the Daleks gone throughout time. Their memory stays, because otherwise it would just be eliminating this universe in favor of the other. I didn’t realize until I got here that the change needs to be triggered with immense amounts of vortex energy channeled outside the TARDIS as well as inside simultaneously. It can’t be done.” He raised up a hand to hold hers against his face.
(Not what can be, but what must.)
“I’ll take the outside. You take the inside. Together, we’ll do what must be done.” She spoke softly, gently, and with absolute certainty. She understood now that the end of one Quest is the beginning of another, or sometimes the beginning of the very same Quest. She had found the Doctor. Although she wished she could let the pinstriped Doctor she had left behind see her again, she accepted that this seemed to be the last step in her journey. Once she might have been afraid, but she’d kicked off that fear like worn out shoes somewhere in the woods.
(The Time War ends.)
“You’ll die. The English name Big Bang is inelegant, but very accurate.” The Doctor had piloted his TARDIS to the beginning of the universe, the genesis of all possibilities, but there was no hope within him.
“Everything dies,” she told him with a smile. “Might as well die giving birth to a universe without Daleks.” So the Beast’s prophecy was true after all. Never mind that she knew that the solution would be incomplete, buying time instead of fixing the problem. Some Daleks would survive, but she still had to do this. Happily ever after is a false promise, but that doesn’t make the story meaningless.
His cheek was less bitterly cold where her hand rested against it. “Yes,” the Doctor said. Then he pulled away from her and began dashing around the room, gathering parts from storage bins. He tackled the assemblage with the sonic screwdriver, then plugged it into the TARDIS console and hammered at the keyboard for a few minutes.
He held up the finished result. It was a circle of twisted wire bedecked with microchips and crystals. He walked over to Rose and ever so gently set it on her head like a crown. The crystals scattered the light that still shone faintly from her, making her feel like a human (lupine?) disco ball.
“When you’re outside, you trigger your part by speaking the words,” the Doctor explained.
“Words?”
“Your name,” said the Doctor, taking her hand and tracing letters on the back of it. BAD WOLF. Of course. She nodded.
“I’ll turn on the outside mike so I’ll hear you and know when to flip the switch in here. Then everything explodes, and bang! No Daleks.” The lack of Time Lords went unspoken.
“Wait…we’re triggering the Big Bang? Does that make you…”
“I’m not God!” he insisted, far too loudly for the room. More calmly, he continued, “We’re not triggering the Big Bang, just moving ourselves from the point before to the point where it’s already happening and altering the paths of two of the emergent universes. It would make more sense if you could understand the explanation in Gallifreyan. It’s still more power than mortals ought to wield, but it’s the only way.”
“Gotcha.” Rose smiled at him as if she weren’t about to throw herself into the most massive explosion ever. He stared back at her in wonder and confusion that couldn’t have been greater if a Cyberman baked him a chocolate birthday cake. Moments passed (or seemed to pass, since they were in the nonspace before the universe where Time was even more illusory than it was elsewhere). A touch of sadness crept into the corners of Rose’s eyes.
“You’ll have to forget me. We don’t want to cause a paradox when you meet me again after this.”
“There is no after this. The TARDIS and I won’t survive any more than you will,” he said, as if to a young child.
“On our first date, you took me to the end of the world, the day Earth’s sun expands. Now it’s our last date from my perspective, and we’re at the beginning of the world. Makes a nice symmetry, don’t you think? You’ll survive.” She leaned closer to him, trying to will some of her certainty into him.
“What if I don’t want to?” he asked, voice sharp as broken ice.
“The universe needs you. Besides, I want you safe, my Doctor.”
Rose slowly put a hand behind his head and slowly drew him down to her. She kissed him with infinite tenderness. He responded as if drawn instinctively to her warmth and vitality and or perhaps drawn consciously to her enigma and danger. His tongue slipped between her lips like a needle into fabric. Rose’s other hand made small circles against the velvet on his back. Their bare toes touched. The warm glow emanating from her skin reached out to embrace the Doctor, but when Rose pulled away it stayed with her.
“You shouldn’t remake the universe wearing clothes from your old life. They don’t fit. Take this coat off. Throw it into the fire of the new universe.” It seemed the right thing to say.
Just then Rose could have ordered the Doctor to walk on water and he would have obeyed (a situation not too different from the normal state of their relationship). She helped him out of his jacket. Then she let him strip off her scarlet hoodie. The Bad Wolf and lost girl were both part of her, but it was the Wolf’s hunting hour; no more Little Red right now.
He stood in his battered, bloody white poet’s shirt and she in her white t-shirt. Without the outer layers that once defined them, the broken soldier and the bloody-footed journeyer looked as naked as Adam and Eve. Naked, but a long way from vulnerable.
“Who are you? Bad Wolf can’t be your only name.” He cupped her chin in his hand.
“Why not? You refuse to be called anything but the Doctor!” she teased. When he looked like he might believe her, she told him, “Find out when you meet me again for the first time.”
She saw a multitude of questions written across his face. However, he asked no more, understanding that knowing more made forgetting harder.
“Well, nameless wolf-woman, are you ready for this?”
Of course she wasn’t. She crossed the woods to find him, and now she was going to lose him, not to mention her life, after a single kiss. Nevertheless, she nodded.
“First we should both eat a biscuit. Then we go kick some plunger,” she said. She picked up the basket from the floor behind her, and they ate. As Rose touched a biscuit to her lips, a shower of sparks from the console startled her into dropping the biscuit. It disappeared into a crack in the wooden floor, forcing her to take another from the basket. The biscuits were chewy and sweet. They tasted of motherly love.
The Doctor kissed Rose’s forehead just beneath the crown device. Rose squeezed his hand briefly, touched the console and felt the heart of the TARDIS beating around her and within her, and went to the door.
“Live,” she reminded him. The door swung and she was gone.
* * *
Lucy Saxon twirled, showing off the elegant new red dress. Whenever her spin allowed, she kept her eyes fixed on the Master. He glanced at her dispassionately over the rim of a tea cup, then looked back down at the reports describing the progress of his rocket fleet. Lucy pouted. The Doctor, his wheelchair parked facing the scene, watched with no change in his wrinkled face. His eyes were so blank lately that the Master had been musing to Lucy about giving him a bit of false hope for the Earth just so he would perk up. This impassive despair made him no fun to torment.
“Well, Harry? What do you think?” Lucy prompted, running her hands up and down her body to emphasize how the dress flattered her curves.
“I think it makes you look like a little girl,” the Master said curtly. Lucy felt crestfallen. Then the Master rose from his chair and stalked towards her, his voice gone low and seductive. “A very pretty little girl lost in the woods and all alone. She is far, far from home, and so very frightened, poor thing. There are goose bumps rising all over her skin. She should be frightened, oh yes, because I’m in the woods too.”
The Master stopped behind Lucy, so close she could feel his breath puffing against her neck as he spoke. She closed her eyes and shivered.
“Little Red Dress, prepare to be devoured. I am the big bad wolf, and I’m going to eat you up.” The Master whirled Lucy around in his arms and kissed her roughly, all nipping teeth and plundering tongue.
They were interrupted by the clatter of the Master’s tea tray hitting the ground and a shout.
“No!” shouted the Doctor, breathing hard from the effort of rising from the wheelchair and knocking the tray down. “No. You are not the Bad Wolf. You are nothing like that. You’re a jackal dressed in wolfskin. You’re a monster. The wolf kills, yes, but only to survive and protect its pack. It keeps the balance. You ravage the world for no reason except that you lack the imagination to do anything but destroy. If the real Bad Wolf ever gets her teeth on you, you will see yourself for what you are, and it will break you.”
It was far and away the most words the Doctor had strung together in weeks and more emotion than he’d shown since the Toclafane first devastated the earth. The Master and Lucy just stared at him.
“Lack imagination, do I?” said the Master eventually with deadly calm. “Francine, tell the guards to bring me Harkness. Tish, go to the kitchen and make an alphabetical list of every piece of equipment in there. I’m going to express my creativity on the Captain, starting with apple corer and working my way down to zester. The Doctor will watch.” The Master brushed past the Doctor, knocking into him with his shoulder hard enough to send the wizened Time Lord to the floor.
The Doctor lay where he landed. He was silent once more, but his eyes were no longer blank. The fiery rage of his outburst appeared to harden into determination, cold and inexorable as a glacier. The two Time Lords glared daggers at each other. The Master looked away first.
Lucy left the room unnoticed. She pulled a book out of the library at random to pass the hours until the Master remembered about her, but it was a book of fairy tales. They left her shaken and sick to her stomach. The Master’s eventual arrival brought no comfort.
Just before dawn, Lucy left the Master snoring and returned to the command room. Jack, eyes closed and unmoving, was still tied spread-eagled to the table, naked except for quite a lot of dried blood. The Doctor sat beside the table and held Jack’s bound hand.
Lucy approached the Doctor with a wince in her walk and a rapidly darkening bruise around her wrist the size of the Master’s grip.
“Who is the Bad Wolf?” she demanded.
The Doctor met her gaze, and Lucy fought the urge to back away.
“The name that keeps me fighting. A friend of mine,” he said.
“Is it powerful?” Lucy asked hungrily.
“She is more than you can possibly imagine,” the Doctor told her. They both knew that Lucy knew quite a lot about power.
“If I help you summon her, will she kill Harry?” Lucy whispered.
“No,” said Jack. Lucy looked at him, startled. She hadn’t realized he was alive at the moment. The Doctor also looked at Jack. The two men locked eyes for a long moment.
“No,” agreed the Doctor at last. “She’s far beyond summoning. But if we could, she wouldn’t kill him.”
“Why can’t she kill him, if she’s so powerful?”
“Oh, it’s not a matter of what she could do. I just think she’d do something far more devastating,” the Doctor said, surprise in his voice as if he had only just understood a great truth. “After she broke his power, she would forgive him.”
The next day, the Master apologized and filled her room with flowers, and Lucy forgot her anger. She decided that the Doctor had gone completely insane. Insanity seemed to suit him, though. His silence seemed more purposeful after that day, and the Master seemed almost afraid of his speech.
Later, everything fell apart and then fell together again. A moment filled with light withered Lucy like a cut flower in the desert. Afterwards, Lucy remembered the thought that pierced her skull and dragged her will into line with the remaining couple billion people on earth, and she remembered being glad of it.
Lucy remembered another voice in her mind for that agonizing shining moment, almost utterly unlike the human chorus but strengthening the Doctor in harmony with them. They would not have succeeded without that terrible voice. It echoed from the burning woods below to the frozen stars, howling.
* * *
When Rose left the TARDIS, the trees were much closer. They looked less like trees than ever. She felt certain that they were watching her.
“This has gone on long enough,” she addressed the forest, voice steady. “Who are you? Show yourselves!”
As if a fog rolled back, the trees’ forms grew clearer. The taller trees had two armlike branches and a narrow top, making them look much like men, though a bit too large and boxy. Their bark shone like metal. The shorter sort were rounded on top with bumpy bark and three branches, one of which ended in a large circular leaf, except it wasn’t a leaf. It was a plunger, and the other two branches were an eyestalk and a blaster.
Daleks. The short trees were Daleks, and the taller ones were Cybermen. The Doctor’s plan at Canary Wharf had sucked them into the Void, and here they were, with her in the no-place between and before the worlds. Millions of them. She’d been walking among them for her whole journey.
As they came towards her, the whiteness of the ground off the path that she’d assumed was snow rose up in clouds like dust. When some got into Rose’s nose, she realized it was neither snow nor dust but ashes.
Underneath, she could now make out traces of stumps, the remains of the true forest that the Daleks and Cybermen must have destroyed. So these were the woodcutters the werewolf warned her about.
The imposter trees weren’t whispering any longer.
“Exterminate!” blared the Daleks.
“Delete!” boomed the Cybermen. Rose thought her ears would burst with the clamor, but she did not retreat. Instead, she shouted.
“Stop!” Amazingly enough, they did.
“By whose authority?” A single Dalek rolled forward and questioned her.
“Mine,” she said, flipping her hair back. “Well, the Doctor’s too.”
The assembled Daleks and Cybermen broke into worried muttering.
“The Doctor we know,” said the spokes-Dalek. “We will exterminate him! But who are you to stand beside him? You are human. You have no weapons. You are defenseless.”
“Me? I’m a Torchwood agent and a former shopgirl. I am Jackie Tyler’s daughter, and I am the heart of the TARDIS incarnate.” The radiance from her skin flared and scattered off the crystals on her crown. The Daleks turned their eyestalks away, dazzled. “I’m in love, and that makes me more dangerous than a cyanide sandwich. I’m the heroine of this story. I am the Bad Wolf.”
There was a sound like a distant bell. They Daleks and Cybermen backpedaled as fast as they could.
“Exterminate!” they shouted, sounding more panicked than menacing.
“No,” said Rose, almost gently. “Germinate.”
Then she smiled at them and exploded.
* * *
The big bang theory tells us that the known universe once had no dimensions at all–no up or down, no left or right, no passage of time, and laws of physics beyond our vision.
-Joel Achenbach, “The God Particle,” National Geographic Magazine, March 2008
Imagine that - nothing. No light, no dark, no up, no down. No life. No time. Without end. My people called it the Void, the Eternals call it the Howling.
-The Doctor, “Army of Ghosts”
* * *
Onwards to Chapter 5
Author:
tardis_stowaway Characters/Pairings: Chiefly Ten/Rose, but there's also a bit of Nine/Rose (I couldn't resist), and some Ten/Rose/Jack (Jack couldn't resist).
Rating: mild PG-13 for a bit of discussion about sex and one or two instances of salty language.
Spoilers: through season 3, spoiler-free AU after that!
Betas:
wendymr and dark_aegis , may the fates smile upon themDisclaimer: Doctor Who is not mine. I just take it out for play dates with my strange imagination.
Summary: Once upon a time, she had abided in the world where lives did not begin with ‘once upon a time.’ No more. Rose walks through the woods. Meanwhile, the Doctor deals with an abundance of Bad Wolf references.
Back to Chapter 3 on LJ or read the story on Teaspoon
Chapter 4: The Beginning and the End
To every thing there is a season: a time for a girl, and a time for the Bad Wolf; a time of war, and a time of peace; a time to be born, and a time to die.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: There is some slightly shaky canon and some fairly hand-wavey science in this chapter. However, at the end of the chapter I’ve included supporting evidence for one of the stranger ideas.
* * *
“Folk seem to have been just landed in [the tales that really mattered], usually–their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, for turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on–and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end.”
-Samwise Gamgee in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
* * *
“Oh. You’ve come,” said the Doctor. It was not a joyful cry of welcome. His voice was flat and dead as a salt pan. Even the Northern accent could not enliven it.
The Doctor was as she had first met him, only more so. His hair was cropped closer than she’d ever seen it, Auschwitz-short. It emphasized his ears and the immense dark circles under his eyes. He leaned over the console as if his legs alone could not support his weight. Instead of his trademark leather jacket, he wore a green velvet frock coat so poorly fitted that inches of forearm stuck out of the cuffs. A large dark stain marred the fabric over his chest. His trousers did not reach his ankles, and his feet were bare. A pair of shoes lay carelessly on the floor. It didn’t take her long to realize that the metallic smell inside the TARDIS must be dried blood, visible on the Doctor’s clothing and the spatters on the TARDIS’s wooden floor.
Wooden floor? The interior of the TARDIS was nothing like what she knew, full of wood and analog-seeming instruments. Still, the TARDIS-feeling, the sensation of simultaneously setting off and coming home, was the same. The TARDIS’s welcome song trilled through her mind, opening up passages long closed. It was the same TARDIS all right, and she was damaged. There were gaping cracks in the floor, a worrisome wheeze in the engines’ hum, and sparking wires hanging from the ceiling. The TARDIS’s presence in her mind was a little too bright, making Rose wonder if the ship was somehow leaking telepathically.
Rose guessed that this Doctor must come from before he met her, apparently just after regenerating. He’d mentioned once that he’d regenerated during the War, and she saw that war written over every inch of his body and his TARDIS. She ached to go to him, to comfort him and confirm his reality though touch, but if he hadn’t met her then she dared not. Rose wished she were a Time Lord; one heart couldn’t break enough to contain what she felt when she saw her Doctor like that and couldn’t properly ease his pain, not to mention her own long loneliness.
But why did he sound like he was expecting her if they hadn’t met yet? So many things she wanted, needed, to say, but they all withered on the way to her mouth.
“You’ve got big ears,” she accidentally said instead, setting her basket on the floor.
“The better to hear you with, but isn’t that supposed to be your line?” He glanced at her for just an instant, and his eyes burned her like liquid nitrogen.
“What?” Rose asked, confused.
“You’re the Bad Wolf. I don’t know what that means, but the Oracle predicted you back on Delphi–the planet, not the city. She gave us the prophecy to end the war: ‘To kill the weed you must yank out its roots, and if they tangle with the roots of your orchard then you must uproot all. Go to the Howling, and the Bad Wolf will find you.’ Never understood the Wolf part, but that seemed tangential. We traced the timelines back to find the point where we could eliminate the Daleks utterly. The only sure way is to go all the way back to the very beginning of the universe, seed their destruction in the path of the Big Bang itself. The changes abolish Gallifrey just as completely. Couldn’t have that, so the Council waited.
“We waited as planet after planet fell. Only when the first Dalek touched Gallifrey’s own soil did we admit that there was no choice. Sodding Council probably thought they were doing me a favor, letting the rebel child be the one to destroy it all. They’d have picked the Master if he hadn’t already run off. They never understood…but that’s not the point. The point is that I got here–got killed on the way, for what it’s worth–and now I can’t do it. Not can’t bring myself to do it. Can’t physically make it happen.” The Doctor gave his explanation as if talking to himself, looking at the console and not Rose. His voice sagged with weariness, so exhausted he sounded almost unconcerned with the events he related.
“We’re at the beginning of the universe? I thought I was in the Void between parallel universes,” Rose asked, hoping that if she kept him talking she could keep him from shattering any further.
“Same thing. It’s the realm of pure possibility, the birthplace of all universes. In relation to any universe, it’s simultaneously before and between that universe and all others. A bit like how light’s a particle and a wave, only the duality here is in temporal-dimensional location. The Void’s all the matter in the universe packed tight, so indistinguishable that nothing can be said to exist. No time, no space. It’s everything and nothing.” He seemed slightly steadier on his feet when talking technical, but Rose knew that was always true.
“There’s woods out there,” she pointed out. “Miles of paths too. That’s not nothing.”
“Out there, you see whatever your mind makes to try to comprehend. You’re the Bad Wolf, so I suppose woods make sense.” The Doctor frowned, seeming to see her for the first time. The force of his gaze ripped into her, stripped away the eggshell and set the hatchling free. “You don’t look much like any wolf I’ve ever seen.”
The better to love you with, my dear, Rose thought. What she said was, “I haven’t always been a wolf.”
“Oh no,” the Doctor said. “A wolf is a wolf, even when it’s in Red Riding Hood’s clothing.” Before she could really register his approach he was standing beside her, fingering the collar of her red hoodie. The back of his hand brushed against her neck, and it was colder than she’d ever felt it. It was not a companionable gesture. When he approached her, he seemed to seek the Bad Wolf, laying himself bare to the danger. (It’s not the urge to fall but the urge to jump, not the impulse to brave the woods but the yearning to embrace the hunter.)
Rose shivered. He was right. She had always been the Wolf, would always be the Wolf, but that wasn’t the whole story.
“We make our own fairy tales,” she told him.
The mangled sound in the TARDIS’s engines might almost have been a howl. Something within Rose answered, stirring from its den in the deep recesses of her mind. She reached up a small hand and laid it against the Doctor’s face. Somehow, the light welling up from her skin seemed perfectly natural to her.
“You’re glowing,” the Doctor said, awe somehow penetrating his grief.
“I will help you end the War, Doctor. What do we do?” (I am the Bad Wolf.)
Rose was more conscious of herself than she’d been when she opened the heart of the TARDIS on the Game Station. She did not see all of time and space, but the power of the Time Vortex that had never been fully expunged surged within her, enhanced by the leaking energies of the damaged TARDIS.
“I’ve created a program on the TARDIS computer to manipulate energy and time streams to set the universe I come from on a collision course with the possible universe where Daleks could not have come into existence. Daleks and Gallifrey. After the moment that I left the universe to come here, the universes will collide, mix a bit, and bounce apart, leaving the Daleks gone throughout time. Their memory stays, because otherwise it would just be eliminating this universe in favor of the other. I didn’t realize until I got here that the change needs to be triggered with immense amounts of vortex energy channeled outside the TARDIS as well as inside simultaneously. It can’t be done.” He raised up a hand to hold hers against his face.
(Not what can be, but what must.)
“I’ll take the outside. You take the inside. Together, we’ll do what must be done.” She spoke softly, gently, and with absolute certainty. She understood now that the end of one Quest is the beginning of another, or sometimes the beginning of the very same Quest. She had found the Doctor. Although she wished she could let the pinstriped Doctor she had left behind see her again, she accepted that this seemed to be the last step in her journey. Once she might have been afraid, but she’d kicked off that fear like worn out shoes somewhere in the woods.
(The Time War ends.)
“You’ll die. The English name Big Bang is inelegant, but very accurate.” The Doctor had piloted his TARDIS to the beginning of the universe, the genesis of all possibilities, but there was no hope within him.
“Everything dies,” she told him with a smile. “Might as well die giving birth to a universe without Daleks.” So the Beast’s prophecy was true after all. Never mind that she knew that the solution would be incomplete, buying time instead of fixing the problem. Some Daleks would survive, but she still had to do this. Happily ever after is a false promise, but that doesn’t make the story meaningless.
His cheek was less bitterly cold where her hand rested against it. “Yes,” the Doctor said. Then he pulled away from her and began dashing around the room, gathering parts from storage bins. He tackled the assemblage with the sonic screwdriver, then plugged it into the TARDIS console and hammered at the keyboard for a few minutes.
He held up the finished result. It was a circle of twisted wire bedecked with microchips and crystals. He walked over to Rose and ever so gently set it on her head like a crown. The crystals scattered the light that still shone faintly from her, making her feel like a human (lupine?) disco ball.
“When you’re outside, you trigger your part by speaking the words,” the Doctor explained.
“Words?”
“Your name,” said the Doctor, taking her hand and tracing letters on the back of it. BAD WOLF. Of course. She nodded.
“I’ll turn on the outside mike so I’ll hear you and know when to flip the switch in here. Then everything explodes, and bang! No Daleks.” The lack of Time Lords went unspoken.
“Wait…we’re triggering the Big Bang? Does that make you…”
“I’m not God!” he insisted, far too loudly for the room. More calmly, he continued, “We’re not triggering the Big Bang, just moving ourselves from the point before to the point where it’s already happening and altering the paths of two of the emergent universes. It would make more sense if you could understand the explanation in Gallifreyan. It’s still more power than mortals ought to wield, but it’s the only way.”
“Gotcha.” Rose smiled at him as if she weren’t about to throw herself into the most massive explosion ever. He stared back at her in wonder and confusion that couldn’t have been greater if a Cyberman baked him a chocolate birthday cake. Moments passed (or seemed to pass, since they were in the nonspace before the universe where Time was even more illusory than it was elsewhere). A touch of sadness crept into the corners of Rose’s eyes.
“You’ll have to forget me. We don’t want to cause a paradox when you meet me again after this.”
“There is no after this. The TARDIS and I won’t survive any more than you will,” he said, as if to a young child.
“On our first date, you took me to the end of the world, the day Earth’s sun expands. Now it’s our last date from my perspective, and we’re at the beginning of the world. Makes a nice symmetry, don’t you think? You’ll survive.” She leaned closer to him, trying to will some of her certainty into him.
“What if I don’t want to?” he asked, voice sharp as broken ice.
“The universe needs you. Besides, I want you safe, my Doctor.”
Rose slowly put a hand behind his head and slowly drew him down to her. She kissed him with infinite tenderness. He responded as if drawn instinctively to her warmth and vitality and or perhaps drawn consciously to her enigma and danger. His tongue slipped between her lips like a needle into fabric. Rose’s other hand made small circles against the velvet on his back. Their bare toes touched. The warm glow emanating from her skin reached out to embrace the Doctor, but when Rose pulled away it stayed with her.
“You shouldn’t remake the universe wearing clothes from your old life. They don’t fit. Take this coat off. Throw it into the fire of the new universe.” It seemed the right thing to say.
Just then Rose could have ordered the Doctor to walk on water and he would have obeyed (a situation not too different from the normal state of their relationship). She helped him out of his jacket. Then she let him strip off her scarlet hoodie. The Bad Wolf and lost girl were both part of her, but it was the Wolf’s hunting hour; no more Little Red right now.
He stood in his battered, bloody white poet’s shirt and she in her white t-shirt. Without the outer layers that once defined them, the broken soldier and the bloody-footed journeyer looked as naked as Adam and Eve. Naked, but a long way from vulnerable.
“Who are you? Bad Wolf can’t be your only name.” He cupped her chin in his hand.
“Why not? You refuse to be called anything but the Doctor!” she teased. When he looked like he might believe her, she told him, “Find out when you meet me again for the first time.”
She saw a multitude of questions written across his face. However, he asked no more, understanding that knowing more made forgetting harder.
“Well, nameless wolf-woman, are you ready for this?”
Of course she wasn’t. She crossed the woods to find him, and now she was going to lose him, not to mention her life, after a single kiss. Nevertheless, she nodded.
“First we should both eat a biscuit. Then we go kick some plunger,” she said. She picked up the basket from the floor behind her, and they ate. As Rose touched a biscuit to her lips, a shower of sparks from the console startled her into dropping the biscuit. It disappeared into a crack in the wooden floor, forcing her to take another from the basket. The biscuits were chewy and sweet. They tasted of motherly love.
The Doctor kissed Rose’s forehead just beneath the crown device. Rose squeezed his hand briefly, touched the console and felt the heart of the TARDIS beating around her and within her, and went to the door.
“Live,” she reminded him. The door swung and she was gone.
* * *
Lucy Saxon twirled, showing off the elegant new red dress. Whenever her spin allowed, she kept her eyes fixed on the Master. He glanced at her dispassionately over the rim of a tea cup, then looked back down at the reports describing the progress of his rocket fleet. Lucy pouted. The Doctor, his wheelchair parked facing the scene, watched with no change in his wrinkled face. His eyes were so blank lately that the Master had been musing to Lucy about giving him a bit of false hope for the Earth just so he would perk up. This impassive despair made him no fun to torment.
“Well, Harry? What do you think?” Lucy prompted, running her hands up and down her body to emphasize how the dress flattered her curves.
“I think it makes you look like a little girl,” the Master said curtly. Lucy felt crestfallen. Then the Master rose from his chair and stalked towards her, his voice gone low and seductive. “A very pretty little girl lost in the woods and all alone. She is far, far from home, and so very frightened, poor thing. There are goose bumps rising all over her skin. She should be frightened, oh yes, because I’m in the woods too.”
The Master stopped behind Lucy, so close she could feel his breath puffing against her neck as he spoke. She closed her eyes and shivered.
“Little Red Dress, prepare to be devoured. I am the big bad wolf, and I’m going to eat you up.” The Master whirled Lucy around in his arms and kissed her roughly, all nipping teeth and plundering tongue.
They were interrupted by the clatter of the Master’s tea tray hitting the ground and a shout.
“No!” shouted the Doctor, breathing hard from the effort of rising from the wheelchair and knocking the tray down. “No. You are not the Bad Wolf. You are nothing like that. You’re a jackal dressed in wolfskin. You’re a monster. The wolf kills, yes, but only to survive and protect its pack. It keeps the balance. You ravage the world for no reason except that you lack the imagination to do anything but destroy. If the real Bad Wolf ever gets her teeth on you, you will see yourself for what you are, and it will break you.”
It was far and away the most words the Doctor had strung together in weeks and more emotion than he’d shown since the Toclafane first devastated the earth. The Master and Lucy just stared at him.
“Lack imagination, do I?” said the Master eventually with deadly calm. “Francine, tell the guards to bring me Harkness. Tish, go to the kitchen and make an alphabetical list of every piece of equipment in there. I’m going to express my creativity on the Captain, starting with apple corer and working my way down to zester. The Doctor will watch.” The Master brushed past the Doctor, knocking into him with his shoulder hard enough to send the wizened Time Lord to the floor.
The Doctor lay where he landed. He was silent once more, but his eyes were no longer blank. The fiery rage of his outburst appeared to harden into determination, cold and inexorable as a glacier. The two Time Lords glared daggers at each other. The Master looked away first.
Lucy left the room unnoticed. She pulled a book out of the library at random to pass the hours until the Master remembered about her, but it was a book of fairy tales. They left her shaken and sick to her stomach. The Master’s eventual arrival brought no comfort.
Just before dawn, Lucy left the Master snoring and returned to the command room. Jack, eyes closed and unmoving, was still tied spread-eagled to the table, naked except for quite a lot of dried blood. The Doctor sat beside the table and held Jack’s bound hand.
Lucy approached the Doctor with a wince in her walk and a rapidly darkening bruise around her wrist the size of the Master’s grip.
“Who is the Bad Wolf?” she demanded.
The Doctor met her gaze, and Lucy fought the urge to back away.
“The name that keeps me fighting. A friend of mine,” he said.
“Is it powerful?” Lucy asked hungrily.
“She is more than you can possibly imagine,” the Doctor told her. They both knew that Lucy knew quite a lot about power.
“If I help you summon her, will she kill Harry?” Lucy whispered.
“No,” said Jack. Lucy looked at him, startled. She hadn’t realized he was alive at the moment. The Doctor also looked at Jack. The two men locked eyes for a long moment.
“No,” agreed the Doctor at last. “She’s far beyond summoning. But if we could, she wouldn’t kill him.”
“Why can’t she kill him, if she’s so powerful?”
“Oh, it’s not a matter of what she could do. I just think she’d do something far more devastating,” the Doctor said, surprise in his voice as if he had only just understood a great truth. “After she broke his power, she would forgive him.”
The next day, the Master apologized and filled her room with flowers, and Lucy forgot her anger. She decided that the Doctor had gone completely insane. Insanity seemed to suit him, though. His silence seemed more purposeful after that day, and the Master seemed almost afraid of his speech.
Later, everything fell apart and then fell together again. A moment filled with light withered Lucy like a cut flower in the desert. Afterwards, Lucy remembered the thought that pierced her skull and dragged her will into line with the remaining couple billion people on earth, and she remembered being glad of it.
Lucy remembered another voice in her mind for that agonizing shining moment, almost utterly unlike the human chorus but strengthening the Doctor in harmony with them. They would not have succeeded without that terrible voice. It echoed from the burning woods below to the frozen stars, howling.
* * *
When Rose left the TARDIS, the trees were much closer. They looked less like trees than ever. She felt certain that they were watching her.
“This has gone on long enough,” she addressed the forest, voice steady. “Who are you? Show yourselves!”
As if a fog rolled back, the trees’ forms grew clearer. The taller trees had two armlike branches and a narrow top, making them look much like men, though a bit too large and boxy. Their bark shone like metal. The shorter sort were rounded on top with bumpy bark and three branches, one of which ended in a large circular leaf, except it wasn’t a leaf. It was a plunger, and the other two branches were an eyestalk and a blaster.
Daleks. The short trees were Daleks, and the taller ones were Cybermen. The Doctor’s plan at Canary Wharf had sucked them into the Void, and here they were, with her in the no-place between and before the worlds. Millions of them. She’d been walking among them for her whole journey.
As they came towards her, the whiteness of the ground off the path that she’d assumed was snow rose up in clouds like dust. When some got into Rose’s nose, she realized it was neither snow nor dust but ashes.
Underneath, she could now make out traces of stumps, the remains of the true forest that the Daleks and Cybermen must have destroyed. So these were the woodcutters the werewolf warned her about.
The imposter trees weren’t whispering any longer.
“Exterminate!” blared the Daleks.
“Delete!” boomed the Cybermen. Rose thought her ears would burst with the clamor, but she did not retreat. Instead, she shouted.
“Stop!” Amazingly enough, they did.
“By whose authority?” A single Dalek rolled forward and questioned her.
“Mine,” she said, flipping her hair back. “Well, the Doctor’s too.”
The assembled Daleks and Cybermen broke into worried muttering.
“The Doctor we know,” said the spokes-Dalek. “We will exterminate him! But who are you to stand beside him? You are human. You have no weapons. You are defenseless.”
“Me? I’m a Torchwood agent and a former shopgirl. I am Jackie Tyler’s daughter, and I am the heart of the TARDIS incarnate.” The radiance from her skin flared and scattered off the crystals on her crown. The Daleks turned their eyestalks away, dazzled. “I’m in love, and that makes me more dangerous than a cyanide sandwich. I’m the heroine of this story. I am the Bad Wolf.”
There was a sound like a distant bell. They Daleks and Cybermen backpedaled as fast as they could.
“Exterminate!” they shouted, sounding more panicked than menacing.
“No,” said Rose, almost gently. “Germinate.”
Then she smiled at them and exploded.
* * *
The big bang theory tells us that the known universe once had no dimensions at all–no up or down, no left or right, no passage of time, and laws of physics beyond our vision.
-Joel Achenbach, “The God Particle,” National Geographic Magazine, March 2008
Imagine that - nothing. No light, no dark, no up, no down. No life. No time. Without end. My people called it the Void, the Eternals call it the Howling.
-The Doctor, “Army of Ghosts”
* * *
Onwards to Chapter 5
