Archive of Our Own

I was meant to be twins, you know. Wonder how that would've worked out—seems like Mum had enough trouble with just one kid—can you imagine her with two? No real reason, just everybody thought for sure she was pregnant with twins. Big surprise when all there was was me.

I didn't know anything about it. I mean, it's the kind of thing everyone would have forgot, after a while. Except when I was seven and driving Mum 'round the bend one day, I remember she threw her hands up in the air and complained that I was supposed to be twins, and then we'd each only be half the trouble. And after that, I wouldn't let it alone.

It was Gramps who told me, finally—Mum denied she'd ever said such a thing, of course. Twins, one boy and one girl. No reason for it, except that everybody knew she was having twins. Her cousin Diane actually knitted two baby afghans, one pink, one blue. And then she went in to see the doctor, and there was only one heartbeat. Everyone was surprised except the doctor, who looked at them like they were all mad.

At first, I thought it would have been great—Mum could yell at my brother instead of me. Then for a while I hated that twin brother I never had. He was someone I had to measure up against—someone I could never be as good as, even though he'd never been real. Every time Mum told me I had to study harder, it was because my brother would have. When I decided to go to secretarial school and she was so set against it, I knew she'd wanted the twin who went on to do A-levels.

When I opened my eyes after Davros flung me into a wall, my first thought was "My god—now I really am twins.

"Let's see if we really are brilliant."

Oh, they were brilliant. They were all brilliant! It was mad and brilliant and utterly satisfying to watch them flying the TARDIS. The Doctor looked at Donna at the same time she looked at him, and they smiled; and one heart or no, everything was right with the universe. He wished the moment could last forever.

It couldn't, of course. It was a bit of a nuisance, trying to see timelines with his whole time sense feeling shifted half a step to the left, but he didn't really have to see them to know how this would go. Sarah Jane would go home to Luke, Martha would go home to her fiancé and her life, Jack would go home to his team. The other Doctor would try to put him off the ship one way or the other—either with Rose, if she'd settle for him, or with Torchwood if not. A Time Lord-sized ego wouldn't take well to seeing its mirror on a day-to-day basis. And Donna . . . .

Donna.

As if she could hear his thoughts, she elbowed him and said, "If you were him—and you are—what would you do?"

He hesitated and tried to keep his grin from flagging. "Donna, I might have got only one heart out of this, but most of the biology's on track, including homeothermy enforcing a reasonable core temperature and, presumably, fairly congruent neural architecture . . . ."

"My hardware won't run my software," she interrupted tartly. Donna knowing as much neurobiology as he did was going to take some getting used to . . . except he wasn't going to have time to get used to it. "I'm not letting the pair of you take my mind away. Find another option."

Another option? What did she think he could do? Yes, he was a genius, but some things were impossible, even for him. "Donna—"

"Oi!” She glared at him sidelong. The glare became a cheeky grin in a mercurial switch of emotions he was far more used to feeling than seeing from the outside. "That pattern of ours complete yet, Space Man?"

He frowned, feeling for the curious entanglement of their timelines. It was a bit obscured, like looking through dark glass, but he could still see it. His eyebrows rose in surprise. "No."

She elbowed him in the ribs. "Right, then. Got a fair bit of engineering to do on the fly, I'd say."

He shook his head. "Just what are you thinking?" He found himself chasing down logic trees of his own, trying to imagine a solution to the problem of Donna's brain that he hadn't already considered and discarded.

"Don't know yet," she said, unconcerned. "I'm not changing my mind and I'm not letting either of you change it for me. What do we have that will revise the physiology, instead?" He considered the question, and she smiled. "We're fighting time, and not just because I don't want my neural matter parboiled. I'm going to recruit some help with talented hands. You find a way to keep the other Doctor tied up."

He stared after her as she walked off. Of the tasks she'd just set him, upgrading Donna's brain might be the easier.

Most beings in the universe only argued with themselves if they were nutters. A Time Lord ought only to end up arguing with himself if he'd been careless enough to cross his own timeline—and even then, the Doctor found the arguments consisted largely of snarky comments, as the man he was didn't always get on well with the man he'd been. A battle of wills between two men who thought the same way, who were both exactly when they ought to be . . . well, the Doctor wasn't entirely sure if he was the irresistible force or the immovable object. He supposed it depended on your point of view, and his double seemed to feel quite strongly. Maybe it was Donna's influence.

"How dare you?" It was his own glare, almost. He wasn't sure he could do outrage quite like the fellow in the blue pinstriped suit.

It was just as well he was having this conversation with his double in his bedroom, with no one else around to witness it. He hadn't expected it to turn into an argument. "Because it's the right thing to do," he said. As much as he wanted to keep her, keep all of them . . . .

He got a very Donna eye roll for his trouble. "What, stranding her in another universe without so much as asking her? I know I've got practice running away, but that's beyond cowardly—it's rude."

What? How dare this late-comer question his judgment about his Rose? He glared back. "We are rude. Besides, what's rude about letting her have the life she always wanted with the man she loves?" Who just doesn't happen to be me . . . .

"The part where you assume you know what she wants."

The Doctor sighed. Pacing felt better than standing still, and it also meant he spent less time looking at his double. Why was he even having this conversation? This was him. Surely he understood that at a certain point, what a companion wanted hardly mattered. "She wants what all young human women want. Love, someone to grow old with, and Sunday dinner with her mum." Not that he hadn't wished he could break her of the habit, back when he was a new man and Rose thought she was immortal, and he pretended he wasn't.

His double in the blue suit watched him, only his eyes moving. There was something unnatural about it. "The way all Time Lords watch history unfold before them like a grand tapestry, and never interfere?"

The dry note in his voice grated on the Doctor's nerves. He stopped, turning to his double suddenly. "You're me. You love her enough to go with her." He studied this other self, this man in the blue suit, trying to fathom what might be going on inside a still essentially Time Lord cranium to inspire this kind of eleventh hour . . . wibbling. All he saw was bottomless sorrow coming at him from a face he looked at in the mirror every day. Rassilon, was that what it looked like? How depressing.

"Don't you love her enough to keep her here?" his double said, a hint of anger coloring the sadness. Or are you too afraid what it might mean if she really does mean "forever?"

The Doctor shuddered at the thought of Rose growing old before his eyes, still loving him. Who am I to inspire that kind of love? I don't deserve it. It'll all end in tears—it always does.

The exchange was over in an eye blink, the Doctors each taking half a step back from the other at the sudden, unintentional telepathic contact. "Psychic entrainment. Oh, isn't that wizard?" the new Doctor complained. "I wonder how long that'll last?”

As for himself, he took care to shield his inner thoughts more carefully—the last thing he needed right now was for his double to find some of the uncertainties lurking about his mind. Not while there was so much to be done if he was to keep the others from knowing Donna's fate. And Donna deserved to be remembered as brilliant. He said, "If we wait long enough for Rose to figure out for herself that this is the best thing, the walls between the universes will have closed again—with her on the wrong side. Her family's there. She's got a life. You have to do it."

"Have to? Oh, that's rich. You can take your Time Lordly superiority and bloody well go to hell with it!"

He clucked his tongue. "Language!"

"Yes, it was!" his double snapped. "We don't have time for this."

At least in that, they were on the same page. He sighed. "No, we don't. Did you want to say goodbye to Sarah Jane? It might be a bit much, the both of us."

He got a headshake for his solicitous offer. "You go on. I'll get us set to drop Jack off."

I called Mum. I had to, didn't I? It wasn't like she wouldn't have noticed the Earth being dragged back where it belonged and set to spinning rightly in its orbit, and she'd wonder where I was. I told her I was okay, and it was true—so far, my head felt a lot like I'd just woken up after a night out with Nerys and the girls, but that was going to change.

Mum was still asking questions when the Doctor—the first Doctor, the one in the brown suit—walked back into the console room. I hung up.

"So, Ealing first, Sarah Jane? Luke will be expecting you.” The Doctor grinned, and I knew that expression from the inside. It was the grin he used when he had to lie.

So what was he lying about? I spent the hop to Ealing trying to puzzle it out, but I still hadn't worked through it when he and Sarah Jane stepped outside.

No more time to fret over it then. "Oi, Handsome Jack, a word!" I said.

Jack turned from where he'd been talking to Rose and gave me the raised eyebrows and the big cheeky grin. I remembered that grin. I remembered those lips, actually, in ways that— Ew. There are some things you're not ever meant to know about your best mate. Rose muttered something that looked like "It's okay, I'm not going anywhere," but I couldn't be sure over the din of cheerful conversation in the room.

He sauntered over. "I've got to say, the Doctor never looked so good."

There are worse ways to start a conversation than with a man admiring your rack. I smiled. "You say the nicest things. Now, how well do you remember your way around the storerooms?"

He looked surprised. "Not quite the question I was hoping for," he said, his voice full of cheerful innuendo even as his eyes telegraphed a mental stroll through the TARDIS's vast array of storerooms. "What do you need?"

I shrugged. "Tell you in a minute, when Blue Boy gets back out here and we can put our heads together. See, being partly the Doctor is fantastic, but it's a bit of a strain. Human neural matter simply doesn't run at the rate that Time Lord thought processes require without, well . . . side effects. Continuous electrical stimulation of certain cells takes its toll, neurotransmitter levels build faster than they can be inactivated—"

Jack was frowning. It looked horribly out of place on his face. This was what Torchwood had done to him. Not that the Doctor hadn't played his own part in that. "Wait a minute. Just what are you trying to say—being the Doctor means your head's going to explode?"

I rolled my eyes. "Nah, not really. That would be a bit dramatic, wouldn't it? All the same, it's going to be all bad if we don't do something, and you always were a dab hand with a soldering iron."

I probably shouldn't have said "soldering iron" while he was still hung up on my brain. "Maybe we should talk to the Doctor about this first," he said.

"We will," I said as my partner in crime reappeared with a toolkit and a box of bits and bobs in his arms. He dropped them both on the floor and walked straight over to Rose. "Ooo, we're pulling out the big guns," I murmured. Jack took a step in that direction and I caught his wrist. "Let him talk to her."

I didn't know Jack had that dark a look in him. "I haven't seen her in a hundred and forty years, and I've hardly gotten to say two words to her since she turned up again. Don't I get a chance to talk to her, too?"

I squeezed his wrist, that being the bit that was handiest. "It's not like that, Jack. You'll get your chance, and then some.” He looked puzzled, but started to relax. "Right this minute, we need to act fast, and the thing that's most likely to get in our way is the Time Lord on the other side of that door," I said, nodding toward it.

He shook his head. "Why will he get in our way?

"Our way." I had him. "Because he's an alien prawn who knows what's best for everybody but him."

He grinned. "Donna, I knew you were more than just a pair of fantastic breasts."

There's admiration, and then there's admiration. I let go of his wrist to smack his arm. "Oi!"

I wanted nothing more than to get my hands into that box of parts and pieces, but the way I figured it, we were probably repurposing either the reverse biofeedback acceleration chamber or the chameleon arch, and either way, it would take both of us plus Jack. The reverse biofeedback acceleration chamber wouldn't be as fast, but I wasn't sure the chameleon arch would turn the trick—it was only ever designed to downgrade from a more complex physiology to a less complex one and set the trigger for the reversal.

The other Doctor stepped into the TARDIS. His eyes fixed on Rose and the new Doctor with that dark sort of look he gets—the one where he's expecting to be hurt. "Well then, off to Cardiff!" he said, all false enthusiasm. "Allons-y!"

"Doctor," Rose said, walking toward him.

The Doctor—my Doctor, I suppose, since we'd both come out of the same meta-crisis—crossed to the console with a familiar bouncing step. He caught Jackie's wrist along the way and dragged her over to an empty station. "I've got this one," he told the proper Doctor cheerfully. "Jackie, what I need you to do is . . . ." Jackie couldn't have looked more surprised if he'd kissed her.

"Doctor," Rose repeated, "I have to talk to you.”

Oh, you're in for it now, Martian. He shook his head.

"Yes. Now," Rose said, ignoring his body language and lacing her fingers through his. "Three Doctors, yeah? I'm sure the other two have got things under control."

I smiled and gave him a cheerful wave, hoping Jack wouldn't take this moment to weigh in on the issue. With a last concerned look at Jackie Tyler, the Doctor let Rose lead him into the main corridor.

I looked at the remaining Doctor and grinned. He let go of Jackie and executed the dematerialization sequence, putting us in a holding pattern in the Vortex. Then he clapped his hands together and said, "Right! Modifying the chameleon arch!"

I went straight to the box of parts and started rummaging through to see what he'd brought. "Jack," the Doctor said, "we need to build a neural extrapolator. There's a quantum interpolator down in Storage Three; bring it up here and I'll tell you what to do with it next."

It was such a relief to be alone with the Doctor as Rose drew him along the corridor. She'd spent all that time trying to save him, so that he could save the universes, and now there were two of them—three, if Donna counted—and it was bloody madness just trying to keep track of everyone in the console room, let alone call one of them by name. But just one Doctor—this, she thought she could probably manage. At least long enough to buy the other one the time he said they needed to help Donna.

She realized she was headed toward the Doctor's bedroom, a path her feet had walked so many times she didn't even need to pay attention to it. And that wasn't right at all, not for this conversation. She turned the corner and hoped the room she needed—the room she and he had both avoided so carefully for so long—still lay disused and untouched. She felt the Doctor's hand tense in hers as she made the turn, so the odds were good. "Rose," he said, "what's this all about?"

She ignored the question and the way he was dragging his feet, stopping in front of the door she wanted and reflexively sending a little thank you to the TARDIS as it opened freely under her touch. The bed was just as she remembered it, the plane black duvet still rumpled. She fancied she could still translate the folds in it into the pattern of limbs where she and her two blokes lay the last time they all three slept together. The memory tightened her throat and she pushed it away, down into the little box where she kept all the things she learned in a timeline which no longer existed except in her memory, and shut the lid on it.

The Doctor's—this Doctor's—eyes were so dark. Had his eyes ever been so dark when she'd traveled with him? She hated to do this to him with his eyes so deep and sad, but the question needed asking, and there would never be a better time. "Why did we leave Jack behind?"

The Doctor blinked, and she watched as he tried to hide it all away with his old grin, the one that made her pulse quicken and tightened things low in her belly. "What? Where is this coming from? He stayed behind to help rebuild the Earth."

It was the same old answer, the same old lie, and what could she do, tell him she'd lived that piece of the Earth's timeline over and over so many times, and it had been a lie each time, and it was time he told her the truth? He'd have some things to say about her crossing her own timestream. Not that she'd let that stop her, if that was what it took. She'd fought too long and too hard to convince Donna Noble that she was brilliant, even if Donna didn't remember it now. She wouldn't let the Doctor take that away from her, not if she could help it. Not as long as there was a choice.

"No. No, he didn't.” It was easy to let her voice tremble as she looked up at him, easy to let him put both hands on her waist to steady her. "We left him there, and you let me think he was dead."

"I never said—"

She glared. "You never had to! You told the same lie so often, I had to wonder what it was you wouldn't tell me. And what else was so bad that it was better to lie to me?"

He was frowning; she'd put him on the defensive. He let go of her and started pacing at the foot of what used to be their bed: his, hers, and Jack's together. "I've never had a problem lying, Rose, you know that. And the truth was . . . complicated."

Oh, that didn't surprise her at all. She and Jack had spent enough time together in enough different timelines trying to find any reasonable explanation that if it were simple, they'd have come up with something before now. Whatever the truth was, she was sure it was going to hurt. But she had to know. She was going to spend the rest of her life in this universe, with this man, and she had to start by knowing why he'd let them abandon their other lover. Because she'd promised Jack in another timeline that they would come back for him.

And whatever the answer was, the Doctor would spend a lot of time trying to justify himself to her. Time his two counterparts could use to save Donna's sanity. "Complicated, yeah, that doesn't surprise me.” She sat on the edge of the bed, where he'd have to look at the still-disarranged bedclothes every time he looked at her. "So go on then. Explain it to me."

The chameleon arch began to slip again as Martha's gaze drifted back to the Doctor and Jack. "Hold that steady now, Martha."

"I'm sorry, it's just, it's all a bit much," she said, anchoring it more firmly while I continued running the connections that were meant to hook the neural extrapolator in. "I mean, you're not exactly still you, but you're not exactly him, either."

Brilliant Martha Jones, who walked a world in its death throes for a year because the Doctor asked her to, found this all "a bit much." Bad sign, that, not that I could blame her. Mind you, the pain and tension of oncoming neural collapse might have had something to do with my own feeling of being slightly overwhelmed. "I know," I said. "It's a bit mad, but it's the way it is. And I'd rather this than a life where I never met the Doctor.” Her eyes were drifting again. "Wouldn't you?"

That got her attention back. She smiled that secret, almost wicked little smile I remembered. I'd never realized how much the Doctor loved it in her. "Yeah," she admitted.

I clipped a connection and grabbed for a fresh spool of santrillium wire. "You keep looking at them. Why?"

She hesitated. "How much of the Doctor's memories do you have?"

I stripped the end of the wire like I'd been doing it all my life. In a way, I really had. "All of them.” I smiled for her, even as I kept working. "Haven't looked at them all, but it's all in here somewhere. If it weren't, I probably wouldn't feel like my brain was turning into overcooked pudding."

She winced, but went on. "They were lovers for a while, right after the Master died. I don't know what it was, really, except something they both needed. And now Jack's out here helping one Doctor build something, while Rose is off doing who knows what with the other one."

This bit of wiring was so repetitive, my fingers almost did it on their own. The Doctor would never have noticed, being no less of a Martian for not being from Mars, but it was perfectly clear to me what she thought they were doing. "Bending his ear about something he'd rather not talk about, unless I miss my guess. Not that it would bother Jack if they were shagging, except that I'm sure he'd rather be there too.” From the corner of my eye, I watched her try not to look startled. "They were very much in love, once, the three of them."

"Oh."

There was a sudden stabbing pain behind my right eye, and I had to stop for a minute. "You were so surprised, the first time we met, that he'd told me how brilliant you were. You have to understand . . . he'd lost them both. He left Jack, and then lost Rose a year later. He didn't always see you when you traveled with him, and that's nothing to do with you, Martha. Some days, he didn't see anyone; all he could see was what he'd lost."

I turned to look at her and she nodded reluctantly. "You're not okay.” It wasn't a question.

I forced myself to smile. It was easier now, somehow, even if it was his smile. "No," I agreed, and forced myself back to wiring the connectors. "I need you to do something for me. Get the bioscanner out of the med bay and bring it here. The Doctor might try to take it and watch it himself, but don't let him. I need you to watch my bioscan in real-time, so he can make adjustments as we go. You've seen baseline bioscans for both a human and a Time Lord, and the Doctor's too closely involved—he might find himself seeing what he wants to see instead of what's really there. I need you to keep him focused for me. Great big brain and he's still got the attention span of a ferret."

She couldn't help laughing. "Okay," she said. "Now?" She looked at her hands where they lay on the chameleon arch.

"Yes, yes, yes," I said before I could stop myself. I flashed her a grin and glanced over at Mickey and Jackie. "Jackie, help a girl out?"

Donna was running out of time; the Doctor heard it as she sent Martha off on some errand. Time for plan B, then. "Mickey!"

Mickey, deprived of even Jackie Tyler for company, appeared glad of the summons. "Yeah, Boss?" he asked as he walked over.

"I'm going to need you to take over from Jack. Don't worry, this bit is the easy part—Jack, fill him in."

He felt Jack's look, more than saw it, his eyes still glued to the quantum neuralation array he was trying to finish. "And what will I be doing instead?" Jack asked.

Rassilon, this would all be much easier if humans didn't have such a finite number of synaptic channels. The Doctor flexed his fingers to ease the trembling from his constant use of the micromanipulator. "Talk first; I'll explain after."

After a moment, Jack began showing Mickey the procedure for stratocladding the receptors. The Doctor glanced over at Donna, who was pale and sweating. Her hands trembled, but she kept working. "Donna," he asked, "Will you be able to finish the armature?"

She grinned without looking up. "Maybe. How close are you?"

Not close enough. "We may have to aim for immediate stabilization first, then go back and finish the refinements before extrapolating to the ne plus ultra . . . ."

"I can live with that," she agreed.

"That's the idea."

"Mickey's on it," Jack said. "Where'd you want me, Doctor?"

"Away from here," he said. In the back of his mind, a sort of itch made him suspect his Time Lord counterpart was growing restive, which was one more thing he did not need to deal with right now. "You're brilliant, Jack, but I really don't know what effect your particular non-fluxing spatio-temporal signature might have on the process, and the last thing we need is anything else to warp the quantum alignment field."

"Actually," Donna said, "Jack, we need you to go distract the Doctor. The other Doctor, I mean."

Jack's voice was wary. "I thought you had Rose on that."

The Doctor corrected Mickey's grip on the cladding nozzle as Donna said, "We do, but Himself won't be held off forever, no matter how loud the argument gets. I need you to be the reinforcements."

"Distract him.” Jack ran a hand through his hair. "Tall order. Any ideas?"

The Doctor took a moment to look up and give Jack an encouraging grin. "Improvise," he suggested.

"You're a bright boy," Donna added. "And if you really get stuck, there's always that thing that you do with your tongue, your tongue, your tongue."

Jack hesitated outside the door. He'd tried the Doctor's room first, and when they weren't there, he'd tried Rose's, not that he expected she'd done much sleeping there after they'd left him behind. That really only left this room—the one he hadn't been in since he was mortal.

Why would she have dragged the Doctor to the room the three of them used to share?

The knob turned easily under his hand and the door swung silently. Not that the room's occupants would have noticed if it had squealed like a rusty gate. The Doctor paced at the foot of the bed, in the throes of his usual high-volume, high-speed, baffle-them-with-bullshit prattling: " . . . really, truly, dead, and there was nothing I could do to stop it! My hearts were breaking, and I couldn't stop working because the Daleks were almost there—all I could do was try to console myself that you, at least, weren't anywhere near there. And then you came back! And then he was alive again, so glaringly, terrifyingly alive that all I could do was run!"

Rose's eyes were all for the Doctor, who didn't even look up as Jack entered and closed the door behind him. She said, "And you were going to tell him this when? You left him on a damaged space station, with no idea if the air or the gravity was going to hold out and no clue if he could get off it! You let him think we didn't care enough to make sure he was dead before we left, or even to come back and get his body!"

Jack knew he ought to break in, to make sure she knew he was there, but he was really, genuinely curious. He'd never known what line the Doctor had sold to Rose, to keep her from insisting they go back for him. Whatever it was, it sounded like she'd had no illusions about the state of the Game Station when they left it.

"But I've told him now! We traveled to the end of the universe and saved the last few humans together—poor bastards. Never got a moment alone until he had to go into a room full of stet radiation to get the propulsive footprint working, but then I told him." The Doctor tugged his hair into even greater disarray, and Jack hadn't been sure that was possible. "Rose, I really have to go check on Donna—"

"I'm sure they've got it under control. Now what exactly did you tell Jack?" The cold, rational note in her voice trembled, just barely under control, and Jack wondered exactly what kind of hell the Doctor would have to pay when he answered. He almost spoke up, because this wasn't going to be pretty, but pretty wasn't what they were after. Time-consuming, that's what they were going for.

The Doctor's eyes drifted past Rose to fasten on Jack's for a moment. When he looked back at her, he was almost subdued. "I told him that he was a fixed point in space and time. I told him that I was a coward, and I ran from him because he was wrong."

Jack gave him a half-smile. He might always be a little bitter about that, and he'd never be truly at peace with the way the Doctor had run from him like he was a monster, but he'd long since forgiven him.

Rose, on the other hand . . . . She jerked like someone had slapped her. "You told him he was wrong. He was in a room full of radiation, prepared to die for you again if he had to—and don't tell me it wasn't for you," she said as the Doctor opened his mouth to interrupt, "you wouldn't have been with him if it wasn't your idea, and he's Jack; if it was your idea, he was doing it for you—and you told him he was wrong.” Her hands were clenched at her sides and she got to her feet. "How dare you? Do you have any idea how that must have hurt? I've known two different versions of you now, and you've never been so hateful to anyone—how could you do that to Jack?"

Jack's heart tightened in the best possible way. They'd been moving so fast ever since they met again in the middle of a Dalek invasion, they hadn't had the chance to talk, but he'd worried—really worried—that she no longer felt for him the way he still felt for her. But that note in her voice laid all his fears to rest. She wasn't just buying time, and she wasn't asking for the sake of old friendship and a distant affection from a time when she had been so much younger, in so many ways, than the woman standing before him.

She still loved him.

The Doctor stared at her wordlessly. After seconds of silence that felt more like hours, he turned to Jack in mute appeal. "That was a long time ago, sweetheart. In so many different ways," Jack said.

She turned in place with shock in her eyes. "Jack . . . ."

"We've come to terms. It wasn't easy—" and wasn't that an understatement, the two of them learning how to trust each other again during a year of imprisonment and torture on the Valiant "—but . . . it's good.” He glanced at the Doctor, who looked vastly relieved. Hopefully that didn't mean he was about to go charging off to look for Donna. Oops.

Rose trembled a little, her weight on the balls of her feet and a look in her eyes that was both joy and fear. Jack opened his arms and wasn't surprised when she almost knocked the breath out of him with her hug. "I missed you," he whispered.

After a moment, she leaned her head back to look up at him. "But I still don't understand. You can't die. Fixed point in time and space? What happened to you?"

Jack hesitated. He didn't want to tell her. He'd never imagined he'd see her again, and he didn't want to lie to her, but part of him really didn't want her to know. He wasn't sure what would hurt more: the moment where she thought his immortality was a gift, or the one where she realized it wasn't, and blamed herself. He bent to kiss her forehead and she frowned, tilting her head back and dragging him down for a proper snog.

The Doctor's trainers didn't make much noise on the deck, but Jack had been more than half expecting him to make a break for the console room. He looked sideways at the fleeing Time Lord, and when that wasn't effective, broke away from Rose to say, "Doctor? I think you'd better answer that."

The Doctor stopped, caught. Rose turned to look at him, and whatever she saw on his face, it made her bite her lip. "Doctor? What is it you don't want to tell me?"

The Doctor slumped, completely derailed. Rose took his hand, even as Jack pushed her gently back toward the bed. Jack sat, taking Rose with him, and the Doctor crouched in front of her, looking awkwardly at her fingers where they twined with his. "Rose," he said, "how much do you remember about coming back to the Game Station?"

Two Doctors, and from what Mickey could tell, they were using Rose one against the other. It made him angry, but with the look on Rose's face when she dragged Brown Suit down the hall with her, it was the Doctor he should have been worried for. Not that that stopped him worrying about Rose; he'd been doing it so long, he was practically a professional.

In fact, maybe he should think about branching out. Mickey Smith, Torchwood Field Support at Large and Professional Worrier. Donna was in a bad way, and Mickey might only have just met her, but apparently that was no barrier to worrying. She kept trying to keep up a running monologue for Jackie, who was helping her with some bit of wiring, but it was like Mickey's Gran's old turntable: sometimes, she just got stuck. She'd repeat words, or start going off into rhyming words, and every time she did, Blue Suit looked more worried.

". . . Felspoon. Apparently its got mountains that sway in the breeze. Can you imagine?"

"How close, Mickey?" Blue suit asked in a low voice.

Mickey read the depth of the cladding. "Still only at 3.5 millimeters," he said. "And Donna's still wiring."

"Nah, never mind Felspoon. Know who I'd like to meet? Charlie Chaplin! I bet he's great, Charlie Chaplin. Shall we do that? No, of course not—you're going home to your husband. But wouldn't he be brilliant, Charlie Chaplin? Charlie Chester, Charlie Brown, no, he's fiction, friction, fiction, fixing —"

"Doctor," Martha said urgently, never looking up from the equipment she was monitoring.

"—mixing, Rickston, Brixton . . . ."

Blue Suit slammed a connection into place and grabbed the fittings (Mickey still had no idea what they were, but he could tell they were meant to slot into that other piece) out of Mickey's hands. "No time, we'll just have to go like this. If we can get her stabilized, we can finish the cladding and make a second pass for a better neural conversion . . . ."

"If?" Mickey asked. "What do you mean if?"

"Martha, Jackie, I need you to hold her up for a minute," Blue Suit said, fitting bits and bobs together like they were puzzle parts and slipping between Donna and her project as she slumped against Jackie.

"Mickey, hold her," Martha said. "I need to keep monitoring."

Why is it that everyone else gets to give orders, except me? But he was already in motion anyway, grabbing hold of Donna's pale, sweating frame as she staggered and nearly took Jackie over. "Easy there," he said, "you just stay with us. The Doctor'll have you right again in a flash."

On her other side, Jackie gave him a frantic look. "Mickey, what's happening to her?"

Mickey hesitated. "I think her brain is melting.” Jackie gave a horrified look to the woman still muttering between them.

"Her human body's not coping with the Time Lord mind she's got dumped into her head—her temperature just keeps climbing," Martha said, still looking at her screen. "Doctor, you've got maybe ninety seconds before there's irreparable damage!"

"Sorted!" the Doctor proclaimed, stepping away from the machine that hung from the ceiling and taking hold of Donna's shoulders to tug her toward it. "Come on now, Donna, two steps forward. You can do this, I know you can."

Donna stumbled forward, shaking off Mickey and Jackie's help. "Oi! I'm not an idiot, I'm just a bit in need of a heatsink.” She let Blue Suit help fit the creepy headgear in place, though.

"Thirty seconds, Doctor," Martha said.

Blue Suit gave Donna an encouraging smile and stepped away. Mickey never saw him start the stupid thing, but he must have, because all of a sudden there was blue light and Donna was shaking, a muffled squeal of pain coming through her clenched jaw. Jackie clutched at Mickey's arm and he put his hand over hers—it was horrible to watch, even though Mickey knew that the Doctor knew what he was doing, so it would come out all right. It always did, for the Doctor . . . well, most of the time.

Donna's knees buckled and she started to fall. Mickey reached for her reflexively, but "Donna!" Blue Suit shouted, knocking Mickey out of the way and grabbing her about the ribs to hold her up. Blue light crackled and arced between them, and they both screamed.

"I did it?"

The Doctor nodded, his eyes gone deep and serious the way they sometimes could. "You, the TARDIS . . . some combination of the two. Call it the Bad Wolf if you like."

She did it. She'd held godlike power in her little ape brain and brought Jack back to life, and made that life a living hell. Rose didn't know if she wanted to laugh or cry or throw up, and the edges of her vision swam alarmingly. Jack murmured something that was probably meant to be soothing and drew her back to lean against his chest. Whether the leaning helped or whether it was just his tangible presence, still loving her after all she'd done to him, she found the world steadying beneath her and her breath coming more easily. "I'm sorry," she murmured. "I mean, I'm not sorry I brought you back, but I never meant you to have to go through that . . . ."

Jack squeezed her tight. "Do you have any idea how amazing it is to know that someone cared about me that way? It may not always have been a picnic, Rose, but I've been so glad to know that you loved me too much to let me die."

Rose studied the Doctor's face. "I really did try to give us forever, and you didn't want me to know.” She swallowed. "Not that I blame you. And it may not be true for me, but at least Jack really does have forever, so you two will both always have someone."

He looked away, and Jack didn't say anything.

Rose frowned. "Wait a minute—you'll always be there for each other, right, even after . . . I mean, someday, when I'm gone? We're back together now, and I know Jack has his team to look after, but we can still travel together. Split the difference?"

She felt Jack tense beneath her and straightened up so she could turn and look at him. "How do you know about my team?" he asked.

Rose blinked, and tried not to think about how many times she'd seen Tosh and Owen die. "The subnet network," she said. "Wilf said Sylvia wouldn't let him have a web-cam, but I could still see you, you just couldn't see me."

"How did you know where to find Donna's house?" the Doctor asked.

The last thing Rose wanted was to get too deeply into that. Well, second-to-last. If she had to let him yell at her to buy time, she would. She ignored him, still looking at Jack. "Himself's driving got much better since you traveled with him the first time. You could spend time with us, and he could take you back five minutes later, and we could skip forward and pick you up again in a couple of weeks or months.” She forced herself to grin. "I saw that look Ianto gave you. I know we can't just keep you to ourselves, Jack, but . . . ."

"Oi!" The Doctor said. "Don't I get a say in this?"

She turned to look at him. "I don't know," she said. "What happened between you two, that you haven't been together since Jack found you again?"

They both flinched. Jack said, "We both needed some time."

The Doctor's eyes went very wide. "Time . . . Donna!" Rose winced. He grabbed suddenly at his head. "Rassilon, what are they doing out there?"

He was in motion before Rose even realized it. She sprang to her feet, but Jack had the same idea in the same moment and they ended up in a tangled heap on the deck. By the time they got up again, the Doctor was halfway down the main corridor.

My head was killing me.

I was standing in the TARDIS's console room, trying not to die.

No, I was standing in the TARDIS's console room, putting doomed Gallifrey into its eternal prison as it burned and hoping that I would die, too.

No, that's the past. Focus on now. Focus on not dying. Focus on not losing myself. "I am the master of my fate . . . ."

Pain. Well, what did we expect from revising our own neural architecture. Only it wasn't supposed to be our neural architecture. This was supposed to be a one-person ride. Some things in life, you have to do alone.

I was standing at the edge of the Untempered Schism. The raw potential of the universe swept through me, an inescapable wavefront that made my heart race.

One heart. I was meant to have two.

I wouldn't let me die, he . . . I . . . he wouldn't allow it. The frustration of being trapped inside my own head, of knowing that if we weren't fast enough, there was a Time Lord coming to take it all away from me. Well, sod him anyway. Who died and made him God? We'd live on our own terms, or not at all. ". . . I am the captain of my soul."

Only we were meant to have longer--more time for the neural enhancement, not this haphazard linking of particles in one organism with particles in the other. What I wouldn't do for little more time, for one last kiss, the chance to say goodbye to Gramps.

I was standing in the TARDIS's console room. We were. We were meant to be brilliant.

We always were. Brilliant, I mean. Even if I didn't always notice.

I was meant to be twins.

If the Doctor—the other Doctor, she supposed—hadn't grabbed for Donna, she would've fallen. Between the two of them, they were doing an okay job standing upright, but they screamed like they were in horrible pain.

Jackie took a step toward them, even though she had no idea what she could do for them, but she felt Mickey pulling on her arm to keep her back. "Is this normal?" she asked, looking back at him.

Mickey shrugged, his eyes wide with worry. "Your guess is as good as mine."

"Her core temperature is still rising, but more slowly," Martha said, reading something off what looked for all the world like an oversized telly remote. "And . . . what's happening to his brain? I've never seen anything like it—not human or Time Lord!"

"What does it look like?" The Doctor's voice came from the side of the room, as much as this room had sides, anyway. He—the Doctor—the proper Doctor—pelted out of the depths of the TARDIS at top speed. "Martha, what do those readings say?" He rushed over to the panel of the machine with the headset, stabbing at buttons before she even had a chance to answer him.

The handsome fellow in the braces—Jack, Rose had called him—came out of the same hallway, looked, and stopped like he'd hit a brick wall, growling with frustration. Rose was right behind him and nearly bowled him over, she had to stop so fast. "Doctor . . . !" she shouted.

Something terrible was happening right in front of Jackie's eyes, and there wasn't a thing she could do about it. But Rose . . . Rose understood. Rose had a role here, and a purpose; all Jackie could do was stand on the sidelines and watch her first baby be . . . not a baby anymore.

She didn't think the Doctor even heard Rose, the way he and Martha were trading information back and forth. He tugged his hair straight up with one hand, babbling to himself, ". . . needs to become isothermal; this was never going to accomplish that. It's all half-done rubbish! Oh, why didn't they call me?" A shower of sparks went up from the machine and he went back to poking frantically at the panel.

Rose winced and Jack put his arm around her. She leaned into him, all trust and dismay at the scene before her, and he drew her over to stand in front of him, wrapping both arms around her middle as they watched the Doctors together.

Both arms around her, like he had every right to hold her, and she didn't say a word. Oh God, Jackie knew Rose was in love with an alien—she'd tried hard not to think about just how alien he might be, and where. So why was this other bloke holding her daughter like a lover?

It was like watching two galaxies collide, the pair of them passing through each other almost untouched until you noticed the gravatic distortion of the discs. Martha read off the bioscan details, a steady, dependable stream of information, while the Doctor searched for some solution, any solution to this ridiculous problem the two halves of the meta-crisis had just dropped into his lap.

It would have been so much safer just to block Donna's memories. She would never have forgiven him (not that she'd have known), but she'd have been safe. No matter what else happened, he'd always have known that his best mate was safe.

The Doctor made another adjustment. Every time he started to make headway against the neural entanglement, Donna's temperature started rising again. She was human; a single heart was bad enough, but a resting core temperature of 37°C—though it looked like they'd used the chameleon arch to manage a minor modification; call it 30°C on a guess, not that it was easy to tell with her brain overheating—was never going to support the kind of neural processing a Time Lord did as a matter of course. "I can't do it! It just can't be done. I could save him, but not her. I can't separate them!"

"Separate them?" Martha's question hung in the air.

"So don't.” Rose's voice washed over him like a warm, fresh breeze in a stale room. "Just save them."

Could he do that? If he worked from a baseline of irrevocable neural entanglement, partial processing across both brains, could he achieve stability?

"Doctor," Martha said, "whatever's happening to them, will it kill them or leave Donna a vegetable?"

His fingers flew over the instruments, reversing the polarity of the subspace energetic feed. "No. But they'll never forgive me.” I don't know why that should matter; Donna was never going to forgive me anyway. But it does.

"Then I'm with Rose on this one," Martha said.

"At least they'll be alive to hate you.” Jack's comment was very quiet, but he cut right to the core of the issue.

It was remarkably easy, once the Doctor stopped trying to maintain two separate sets of neural pathways, concentrating instead on stabilizing the entanglement as if the pair of them were a single entity. He listened to Martha with half an ear as her scanner told a tale of decreasing cranial inflammation, a reasonable core temperature, and an increase in neural activity in his duplicate that made no sense unless you were tracking the information from both of them at the same time.

"Well," his own voice said from off to the side, "that's a right kick in the trousers, isn't it?"

The Doctor looked up in time to see Donna grin an unfamiliar grin and say, "Oh yes. We knew that pattern wasn't complete yet. And now . . ."

". . . it is," the duplicate Doctor finished seamlessly.

The Doctor stared at them. "Oh, that is so wrong."

"Oi, enough with the 'wrong' already," Rose said.

"'Wrong'? I'll show you wrong.” The words gave the Doctor just enough time to turn around and see Jackie Tyler approaching, but not enough to escape the flat of her hand's connecting with his face. "All that time my daughter was traveling with you, and I trusted you with her. And you, you were out there corrupting her!"

The Doctor rubbed his cheek and gave her a blank look, oh, and didn't that just figure? No wonder Rose had never brought Jack home while they were traveling together. And to think, Jackie had thought Mickey was being ridiculous when he'd come home from Cardiff talking about the three of them together in that blue box.

She turned her back on the alien to look at Rose, who wore a deep blush and an awkward look. "Mum, you're embarrassing me.”

"Embarrassing you? This whole time you told me you were trying to get back to your Doctor. Never once mentioned the one with his arms around you, you just let me think I was sending you off to something better, not that my daughter was a—"

"To be fair," Jack interrupted, "I prefer to be considered the corrupting influence in any situation." He grinned in a way that probably would've made Jackie blush if she weren't so very angry. "And I've never minded being slapped by a pretty woman."

"Jack!" Rose said.

Jackie found herself staring, her mouth still open. She shut it abruptly. "Rose, you told me. That there was only one for you, the only one who mattered."

Rose shook her head, a look of pain too visceral to be faked on her face. "I thought Jack was dead.” She put her hands over his where they rested on her ribs, like he might slip away from her somehow if she let go.

"Universes saved, cranial meltdown averted . . . after all that, Jackie, you want to turn this into The Jeremy Kyle Show?" the proper Doctor asked, walking a wide circle around her to go stand beside Rose.

Rose took his hand.

Jackie stared at them. "It's not right," she said. No one answered her. Rose bit her lip, and her eyes shone with oncoming tears. But it wasn't right, not the three of them!

"Jackie Tyler," Donna said thoughtfully. "Makes brilliant tea."

"Jackie," the other Doctor said, "we might only be a few hours old, but we remember 904 years. And we remember that love is too precious to walk away from it."

Jackie's throat tightened a little.

Donna asked, "What did you name the baby?"

"Tony.” Jackie's answer was automatic.

The other Doctor said, "Tony. Good name. Pete and Jackie, Rose and Tony. All together. He was going to send her back with you, you know?"

Jackie flinched. “After all the trouble she went through to get back to him?" She glared at the proper Doctor.

Rose wiped the corners of her eyes. "Wouldn't have worked. I would never have stayed.” She looked up at the proper Doctor. He opened his mouth to say something, but Rose cut him off. "Why would you try to leave me?"

"You ought to be with your family," he said. "I wasn't going to leave you alone—I'd thought that he," he nodded at the other Doctor, "would stay with you. One heart. No regenerating."

Rose stepped out of Jack's arms, her eyes never leaving the proper Doctor's face. "You were really going to do that?"

He nodded.

She slapped him. The corners of Jackie's mouth twitched as she started to smile in spite of herself.

"Ow! The same cheek. Why is it always the same cheek?"

"Because they haven't had enough practice left-handed," Jack said cheerfully. "But if you keep this up, I'm sure they will. Quit complaining—I've got plenty of practice, and you were going to dump Rose off in another universe without even letting me say goodbye. Just what part of 'love' means you get to make decisions for us?"

"Love," Donna's voice said quietly, very near Jackie's ear. Jackie glanced over her shoulder and found Donna and the other Doctor staring at her with identical compassionate expressions. It was . . . creepy. "If it's precious wherever you find it, she's twice as lucky to have both of them, yeah?"

Jackie swallowed. "I just want her to be happy. I had Pete and her and Tony, and she was always miserable."

"She'll be very happy," the other Doctor said.

"Well, I'm not that easy to get rid of," Rose said sharply. "You're stuck with me, Doctor. Stuck with both of us."

Jackie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, it sure sounds like it."

They grinned at the same time, the other Doctor and Donna, like the same muscles moved both their faces. "We're sure of it," they said.

It had been so strange, having only one heart. Somehow . . . off-balance. Two heartbeats, even if they came with four hands, was much better.

"All right, first stop, Pete's world!" we . . . he . . . said while we both flipped levers.

We . . . I—oh, this was going to take some getting used to—said, "and no time to waste—the walls of the worlds are closing again. Can't have dimensional retroclosure with Jackie and Mickey still in this universe."

Behind us, we heard Jackie's low, intense voice. "Now you swear to me you'll keep her safe. Both of you."

The Time Lord was protesting, "Jackie, I don't know if traveling with me will ever be safe.” Still feeling guilty, then. Not that that really surprised us; we were only too glad to feel shut of that guilt ourselves.

Fortunately, Jack had this one figured out. "We'll take care of her. Always. And coming from us, that's a very long time."

When we landed, Rose wouldn't leave the ship. Jackie probably never noticed, but we remembered Rose as a companion and recognized all the small signals. She might love the Doctor, but she didn't quite trust him. Not today. "I'll miss you," she told Mickey, hugging him.

"Miss you too, babe," he said, trying to keep his voice low, like no one could tell how much it hurt to say goodbye if he didn't put much oomph into it. But we'd been lying and seeing through lies for centuries, and we knew that the only thing that would hurt more than saying goodbye to Rose was staying here, knowing she'd given her heart elsewhere.

"And you," Rose told her mum, holding her close. "I love you, Mum. And Pete, and Tony.” She was sniffling now. "Tell him all about me when he grows up—I wouldn't want him to forget me."

"We never could," Jackie said, sobbing.

When the TARDIS doors closed, Rose gave up on her brave face and cried. We felt this urge to go to her, to comfort her, because she was a companion, and that's what we did with companions. But it wasn't love: we weren't that person anymore. We were different—maybe better, maybe worse, but definitely not the same.

She had the Doctor and Jack, one on each side of her, the Doctor hugging her and Jack murmuring softly in her ear while he held her.

We flew the ship with one body, the other walking over to Martha where she sat on the captain's chair, looking lost. "So, when's the wedding?" I asked, and it was strange suddenly to be alone in my own head, remembering how important things like engagements and anniversaries and babies were, while the rest of him-and-me sent the TARDIS hurtling through the vortex.

She looked blank for a moment, like she hadn't quite kept up. Then she smiled. "July," she said.

"And are we going to be invited?"

"Of course—as long as I can reach you. It's not like there's a mailing address."

I rolled my eyes. "Oi! Still have a phone, don't I? Mind you, I expect we'll all be traveling together for a time while we grow—well, build, actually—a second TARDIS."

She blinked. "You can do that?"

I grinned. "Oh yes. Growing is the easy part: time machine and all. It'll take a little building to get her all shipshape, but he-and-I have a whole lot of exploring of the universe yet to do. We're not going to be tied to himself and this pair. Could you see it? Somebody'd shout ‘Doctor’ and half the ship would look up."

She laughed. "I hate to think what kind of arguments you're going to have with yourself in the meantime," she said.

We groaned. "That makes three of us," we . . . he . . . said.

Martha looked from one to the other of us, her eyes dark and concerned. "Donna, are you . . . okay? I mean, we didn't see any other way, but watching the two of you be not exactly two of you, it's . . . I don't even have the words for what it is."

We wanted to reassure her, to tell her that we were both okay, but we weren't even sure "both" still applied to us. All we really knew was that we felt complete now, whole in a way we hadn't felt since the meta-crisis . . . or maybe ever. We looked off into space through two sets of eyes, considering.

The universe was still huge and mad and at our fingertips. Maybe we could take Gramps with us for a couple of short hops. He'd always looked up at the stars—we could actually take him out to see a few. It would be brilliant, and so would we.

We'd see to it.

We found ourselves smiling. "I was meant to be twins, you know," we said with Donna's lips. "Wonder how that would've worked out—seems like Mum had enough trouble with just one kid—can you imagine her with two? No real reason, just everybody thought for sure she was pregnant with twins . . . ."