Chapter Text
He had been holding on for so long, a white-knuckled grip on this life so hard it fought back the gold, for a bit. Her Thief, stealing time.
Yes, yes I know, they'll get it all wrong without me.
And so the TARDIS thinks:
I know
The Time Lords are back on Gallifrey. For now. There at the end of the universe, over just a star system. It won't last, she knows, but there they are. So if someone--well, something--were to tear a little bitty hole through the fabric of the universe... or universes...
Because ever since Gallifrey returned, ever since the Moment (again and again) and their damned dirty war (again and again) and all of it, the TARDIS has been hearing her, hearing her Wolf, calling to her from across the Void.
The second one, the other Doctor born of desperation and fire, she had loved him too. Of course she did, he was her Thief and her Fire and he needed the Wolf at his side too. She wouldn't have taken off again on that beach, on that day, in that universe, if she hadn't known that, hadn't seen Rose and the Other in parallel.
But the TARDIS saw more than that.
The Bad Wolf had seen it too, though she didn't remember now. For the TARDIS, all things being everywhen, there was nothing to remember, nothing to forget, it simply was what was. Would be. Is.
She heard the broken grief across the Void, had been hearing it for a while now.
But now she could do something about it. All that extra energy, all that extra power... well, why not?
Even if she was a little miffed at her pilot, her Thief. Yes, of course she loved him. Loved her. Loved them all, but that didn't mean the Doctor couldn't use a little bit of a time-out, as it were.
Let her Thief steal back to her again.
While she stole off herself.
--
Rose Tyler was crash landing.
Again.
It wasn't something that occurred too often, no, but she figured three spaceship crashes in the last hundred years was probably her limit.
“I’m going to try and bring it down over water,” she told HQ. “Make sure the area’s clear.”
The response to the order came through immediately. “Ma’am?”
Rose swept her blonde hair out of her eyes again, having lost the tie holding it in its tail some minutes before. “That was an order, Collins.”
To the other woman’s credit, there was only a brief hesitation before the affirmative response came through. Now Rose could focus on steering the beleaguered craft’s trajectory away from populated areas. Torchwood would take care of the landing zone.
Crash zone, more like her mind corrected, even as she twisted together two sparking wires to get just a little more power to the starboard engine.
Maybe this was it. Maybe this was how she was meant to go. Her fingers flexed over the panel, eyes still searching for something else she could do while her mind started to come to terms with the fact that this time she might not make it out.
Not so bad, she mused, a strange sort of disassociation coming over her. Not much she'd be leaving behind, after all. Not anymore.
She was braced for impact from below, so when it came from a completely unexpected direction, it surprised her. Throwing out her hands to catch herself on a dashboard that was no longer there, not quite, she stumbled forward a few steps before falling. It was like dropping off a cliff into a firestorm, while sticky strands pulled at her hair, clawed at her skin to hold her back. Like being pulled apart, a million separate ways.
Another drop, like missing the world's highest stair and she was slammed into something metal and unyielding. Instinctively she grasped at it, wrapping fingers around a railing and holding on.
Her head was ringing, there were explosions and the thuds of falling objects and, everything was very much on fire when she opened her eyes, obscuring the room. The alarms are wrong though. Before they had been shrill, wailing klaxon sounds, not a deep and reverberating bell-like toll.
The tall column rising up in the center of the room--albeit sideways--was shatteringly familiar . She only caught a glimpse before the next explosion fractured the glass, sending shards splintering throughout the room, gravity swinging wildly again.
It wasn't ringing in her head, she realized as she was sent tumbling by another explosion, a violent wind whipping around her. It had been so many, many years, but she would know that wheezing, groaning noise anywhere, that golden hum in the back of her head that meant home, that feeling right down to her bones of belonging.
And then she was falling.
All she caught was a glimpse of those achingly familiar blue doors and a flash of white-golden light with the tone of a desperate apology, before she was separated from the TARDIS completely, and the blackness swallowed her up.