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Heroxia Station was not one of Rose’s favorite places to visit. It was dirty and noisy and felt more like a back alley than a trading hub. Part of that ambiance was deliberate, she assumed, since while there was legitimate trade going on, there was far more black market dealing. It was a galactic back alley. She stuck very close to the Doctor the whole time they were there, not once tempted to wander off, not even to the commissary. They did their business and got back on the TARDIS with him beaming at the parts he’d managed to finally source for his never ending ‘maintenance’. Rose just breathed a sigh of relief that they’d gotten away from there without incident.
Later, she would reflect on just how much trouble she’d borrowed in thinking that.
The Doctor did his usual frenetic dance around the console and flipped a lever that took them into the Vortex. The ship lurched sort of sideways – surprising given that was more materializing behavior than after dematerializing – and then the cloister bell rang. Rose felt a zing in the back of her mind, something like alarm or maybe pain or maybe both, and then the TARDIS fell silent.
Utterly and completely silent. The time rotor stilled, the engine hum was static and the console was dark.
“Doctor?” Rose heard the concern in her own voice and tried again, injecting a little more force behind the name. “Doctor?”
“That’s not supposed to happen,” he muttered. Famous last words, in Rose’s opinion. He tried a few buttons and levers to no avail. He pulled the monitors around to read them, but they had all gone blank. He then scanned the console with the sonic, and frowned at it.
“What is it? What happened?”
He met her eyes across the console room and looked vaguely confused. Not a state she saw him in often and one that was worrying given the circumstances. “I don’t know. ‘S like she’s gone dead.”
She hadn’t truly, of course. Rose could still feel her in her head. Weak and thready, to be sure, but present. That said, every system was inoperable. Not down necessarily, simply unable to be interacted with. They couldn’t go anywhere, not even to land. They were in the Vortex, which meant they couldn’t call for help from another of his incarnations, since they couldn’t give coordinates to their location and time stream. They couldn’t even go outside to see if there was some kind of physical issue.
A sense of dread crept up her spine.
“We still have air, yeah?”
“Yeah. Everything that was functioning is still functioning. Just...frozen.” He crossed his arms and stared at the time rotor, his brow furrowed in thought. “She can’t talk to me.”
“Nor me.”
He glanced at her for a second, registering her words almost idly. It used to be something they didn’t discuss, her connection to the time ship and how it had changed her. These days it was more just a matter of course. Rose was still human on some levels. On others – many others – she was more like what his people had been before they became Time Lords. Ancient Gallifreyan, the Doctor called it.
“I can still feel her though,” Rose went on in a hopeful tone. The Doctor nodded absently. “We just need to figure out what caused this, yeah? And then we’ll fix it.”
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
He really looked at her then and a small smile curved his lips. “Such faith.”
“Well, yeah. Never met a problem with you yet that you haven’t unraveled one way or the other.” She crossed the console and leaned on him until he wrapped an arm around her. “Tell you what. You do your jiggery pokery under the grating and I’ll see how the rest of the ship is doing. Sound good?”
He gave a quick nod of agreement and kissed the top of her head. “Don’t get lost. I have a feeling she can’t move things around and you know how big she is.”
“I won’t go far. I’ll keep to the places we use the most. Meet back here in a bit?”
“Alright.”
---
Ultimately, neither of them found anything. Hours of him poking about under the floor, of her checking their room and the kitchen and the library. They couldn’t find a thing. The water ran, the air was fresh, the pantry was stocked, the inner workings of the mechanics were fine. Well, as fine as they ever were. The lights were a little dim, although that might just have been her imagination since she was used to the ship guiding her with them. The thread in her mind that was the TARDIS remained weak. They were stuck. It was baffling.
Rose made a simple dinner, not especially hungry but knowing they needed to eat. The Doctor continued to test things, moving around the console methodically and occasionally scanning things with the sonic. She eventually got bored of watching and went to bed. She didn’t remember falling asleep.
She did, however, know for a fact that she hadn’t missed her entire morning routine when she found herself in the console room across from him with the lingering sound of the cloister bells in her ears.
“Doctor?” she asked.
He dropped his hands to the dead console and hung his head. He swore in Gallifreyan, which she now could understand, at least partially. The litany of curses trailed off and he looked up at her from under his brows.
“My time sense reset to yesterday. We’re in a loop.”
Rose then did some swearing of her own.
---
After three loops the Doctor determined that they reset at the time of the Incident – now firmly capitalized in both their minds – after a full Gallifreyan day, roughly every 31 hours. For them, subjectively speaking, it was the middle of the afternoon.
After five they discovered that whatever they used in the kitchen was reverting to its previous state upon reset. Which was good news...sort of. They didn’t have to ration water or food or anything. The TARDIS still had environmental controls, but the Doctor was mildly concerned that wouldn’t last indefinitely. As much as she was alive, she was also a mechanical ship. She would eventually run out of fuel and systems would begin shutting down to conserve it. Environmentals were the last on that list, but if they didn’t break the loop somehow, they were potentially in trouble given that they were both effectively immortal.
After ten loops they were no closer to figuring it out than they had been in the beginning. Rose had noted right away that they reset in the same clothes every time, which made sense if they were repeating the same day over and over. It was good in the sense that they didn’t have to worry about things like laundry piling up. But she usually changed right after the loop reset since the clothes she was wearing stank of Heroxia Station.
“Do you think something happened there?” she asked the Doctor, coming back to the console room with a fresh pair of jeans and a comfortable hoodie on. “On the Station, I mean. Did she...I dunno, pick up a bug or something?”
“A bug?”
“Ya know, like a cold. Is she sick?”
The Doctor shrugged. The readings from the sonic always came back normal. There was nothing wrong with the TARDIS, that he could tell. She was just frozen. Rose thought that through.
“Then why the looping?”
The Doctor had no answer, which was not comforting on any level.
After twenty of them, they stopped counting.
---
At the end of a ‘day’, where Rose had spent most of her time in the library teaching herself more circular Gallifreyan for the lack of anything better to do, the Doctor joined her. His face was both grim and satisfied. An odd combination, enough to make her mark her place and give him her full attention.
“The loops aren’t exactly static.”
“How do you mean?”
“We’re moving forward in time and space at a rate of .001 seconds per loop.”
“Okay, and that means what, exactly?”
“We probably don’t have to worry about starving to death.” The look on his face didn’t inspire much confidence in those words.
“Okay…but?”
“Her fuel will take millennia to run out at that rate. A lot of them. We’d go mad long before it happens.”
She thought about that. They reset at the same point each time. Over and over, ad infinitum. She didn’t even know how many times they’d done it now. But they were inside the loop, living in a bubble of repeating relative time. It meant they had clear memories of everything that passed. It wasn’t like they restarted and didn’t know why. But they weren’t aging, weren’t able to affect anything, weren’t really moving. Boredom would kick in soon enough. His frantic need to be on the go was already making him short tempered and impatient. She looked around the library. With an infinite amount of time, she could read every book in here. How long would it take for her to become sick of it, ready to throw herself off the top of a stack just to end the cycle? If that would even work. Now that she was thinking of that, it make her wonder something else, too.
“Doctor, what happens if there’s an accident? One of us gets hurt, or you end up regenerating?” She almost didn’t want to hear the answer, but she knew she needed to. They were going to have to start taking some risks if they wanted to get to the bottom of whatever had happened. And risks for them almost always meant life threatening danger.
“Regeneration is connected to the Vortex, Rose. My cells would decompose before the artron energy could move through them.”
“Even with the looping?”
“’S not something I want to test.” He gave her a rather dry, sardonic look.
“No, I know. But...we should probably try something small anyhow. Nothing life threatening. A papercut or something.”
“Suppose that would work. See if it heals like normal. See if it’s still there at the reset.”
“Right.”
“I’ll do it,” he said before she could reach for the book in front of her. “Shoulda thought of it myself, anyhow.”
And then they were back in the console room, the cloister bells still ringing in her ears and his hand over the dematerialization lever.
They blinked at each other and without a word nodded. They went back to the library, but of course, her book on circular Gallifreyan wasn’t there on the coffee table. The loop had reset, which meant everything else was back where it was when it began. They’d discovered the hard way that nothing could be moved for more than a single day. Even objects put into the Doctor’s transdimensional pockets didn’t stay there from one loop to the next.
“Well, we have 31 hours to test this theory,” he said.
“A papercut,” she reminded him.
His face fell a little. “I would heal from one naturally in that time.”
“Nobody said you had to do it now, you plum. Just wait until the end of the cycle and then do it.”
“Alright. Then what shall we do today, Rose Tyler?”
His impatience to do something, anything, was palpable, and it was getting hard for her to keep him distracted. But she grinned, letting her tongue show between her teeth – thank god that still worked on him – and struck an imperious pose.
“Get naked, Doctor.”
“Right here in the library, Rose?” he retorted with raised eyebrows and a gleam in his eye.
“Yep.”
Now he was grinning. “Fantastic.”
---
They did remember to give him a papercut before the loop ended. But she could tell that it worked even before he said so when they reset in the console room. They were dressed, for one thing, and the various aches and pains from fucking him all over the library were gone.
She thought she’d be happier to know that if the worst happened, it wouldn’t last past a loop reset. But all she could think about was him saying they’d go mad before they’d starve. She understood it now. Nothing changed. Nothing.
It didn’t stop them from christening every surface they could think of, and a few that shouldn’t have their bare skin on it besides. They got rougher with each other, leaving marks and bruises just to see something different, wondering if they would disappear as readily as a papercut. They did. They lost control a little, sure now that there would be no lasting consequences. Rose wondered if madness was already settling in. They found new ways to experiment, new things to try. Some they decided they were going to keep in their repertoire. Others not so much.
The loop in which she did in fact fall off the high library stacks jolted them out of it. The Doctor looked stricken and held her far too close for hours afterward during the next reset. Simply listening to her breathe and the steady thump of her heart. She didn’t remember anything after landing on the floor, unsure if she’d died or had simply been deeply unconscious, her body too broken for him to move on his own. She was afraid to ask him, afraid that the way his hands grasped her were enough of an answer. They were more careful after that, eventually reaching a point where sex didn’t fill the time anymore. Not that they stopped entirely, they simply weren’t as ravenous as before.
They began cooking. Wild, fanciful meals with ingredients from all corners of the universe. Then they tried baking until even the Doctor got tired of banana flavored things.
And then there was the knitting, although that one was more difficult to keep up since her projects never lasted. She did laugh at how well he could do it, though. She began to suspect the long scarf one of his previous bodies had worn had been his own handiwork.
She could speak fluent Gallifreyan before she knew it. She started making a habit of laying her hands on the time rotor, whispering in the chiming language to the TARDIS. The ship didn’t respond, but their bond grew infinitesimally stronger each time.
The Doctor told her about his childhood and the Academy. He told her his name and what that meant for him.
They watched the Hundred Year Serial from Zeronin from start to finish. They hated the ending.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept for more than a post-coital nap.
She couldn’t call her mum or Mickey or any of her friends. The jiggery pokery the Doctor had done to her phone only worked if there was both relative and objective time to bounce the signal off of. He warned her that trying to call anyone would essentially put a pin in time outside the Vortex, making it an event in their time stream. When they got out of the loop – if they got out – there could be a paradox. Then he held her while she alternately sobbed and raged over the unfairness of it all.
The Doctor gave in to a fit of temper when he couldn’t find a working time hinge or something while he was tinkering. He was crushed under a pile of collapsed shelves and everything they’d been holding after he’d torn them off the wall. It was her turn to clasp him too tight after a loop reset. It had been so quick and thorough that he hadn’t even started to regenerate. They both pretended the haunted look in his eyes at what he’d done wasn’t there. Rose stoutly refused to think about the fact that it meant the Doctor could permanently die.
They tried watching more light-hearted fare in the media room after that, but neither of them were in the mood to laugh anymore.
They had a row over something stupid and stopped speaking to each other. Each new loop would leave them glaring at each other before one of them, usually her, left the room. Eventually, the anger passed. She’d forgotten what they were even arguing about, or at least decided that it wasn’t worth making this whole thing more wretched than it already was. They reconnected right there on the grating of the console room, and then against the coral struts. She made a quip about getting to feel the aftereffects for another 31 hours, and how that was better than nothing.
The fight did show them that they needed to start spending time apart as best they could, however. Just so they didn’t get caught in a cycle of irritating each other on purpose. Familiarity breeds contempt. Rose had never truly understood the adage until now. The Doctor would disappear into one of his workshops. Rose would sit in the Garden and listen to the endless music of Susan’s fountain. Or she’d explore the vastness of the ship. She didn’t worry about getting lost or into any trouble. Reset would always take her back to the console room.
When enough loops had passed that they craved more of each other than the glimpse they got at the start of it, they started doing activities together again. Swimming in the pool, or reading aloud in the library, or watching the stars in their simulation of the night sky over the bed. They watched the Hundred Year Serial again and decided they still hated the ending but could see where it came from now. They found rooms that the Doctor had forgotten were even there and he was like a kid at Christmas about some of them. Rose remembered how to feel joy.
She noticed that the cloister bells were gone from her hearing when they reset. The Doctor’s hand was farther from the lever. She’d lost touch with her nascent time sense but didn’t need it to calculate how long it should take for a sound to fade. In terms of the number of loops, it was many. A thousand. Possibly several thousand.
---
They reset and Rose was crying. It was her new starting point at each reset. Enough objective time had passed that a single moment’s misery was now built into the loop. Damn it all. She was bloody tired of it.
The Doctor sighed from his side of the console. “I think it’s time.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, wiping her cheeks.
“I still don’t like it.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “I know.”
“Rose…”
“I know. But we can’t keep doing this. If you have to take it out of me again, you will. If that makes you regenerate, so be it. But if it works, if we can get out of this, won’t it be worth it?”
They stared at each other for a long time. She’d been working on this plan for countless loops now, since she realized touching the rotor and speaking Gallifreyan to the ship was bolstering their frayed bond. The TARDIS was still alive, still fighting whatever it was that had made this happen. They’d long ago figured out that the old girl had put them in the loop in order to save them from something. Or herself. She’d known that sooner or later one of them would figure out how to fix it. Rose had taken the heart of the ship into herself once before. And while she hoped she wouldn’t need to again, she didn’t discount the possibility. But she did think she could connect directly with the TARDIS’s consciousness now. Become Bad Wolf again. Rewrite this endless, infinite moment. Or at least find out why it was happening.
Of course, the Doctor was vehemently against it, citing all sorts of variables they had no way to control or even predict. He would rather live in an infinite loop than risk losing her forever. Rose didn’t think she would be lost. In the end, he made his argument but hadn’t stopped her from her work to get ready for it.
“Doctor, if it works, will it be worth it?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
She moved from her position near the jump seat and laid her hands on the time rotor. The light bathed her in its radiance until she couldn’t see anything else. She could feel that the TARDIS was exhausted, strained from repeating herself so many times. But Rose was strong. She’d learned how to let the sentience inside herself with no effort on the ship’s part. She welcomed her, feeling her physical eyes close while her consciousness rose out of her body and into the complex tangle that was the TARDIS. She didn’t know what the Doctor was seeing, but all around herself was golden light. Familiar and precious.
This time she didn’t draw back from it, but pushed herself deeper, truly joining with the ship.
Show me, she asked, visualizing herself gently cradling the beating heart of the TARDIS in her hands. Show me what happened.
She was back on Heroxia Station. While she and the Doctor were haggling with a merchant, someone walked past the police box. She couldn’t tell what they looked like exactly; they were hooded and cloaked. But they were carrying a tool in their hand, looking at energy readings. They put something on the wood of the ship and walked off. It was a tracer.
Rose zoomed out, widening her view, moving through time to follow the figure to their ship. Data was collected, commands input. They waited. Back on the Station, she and the Doctor entered the TARDIS and began their departure. The figure in the ship kept waiting. And then the TARDIS was gone, into the Vortex and the loops began. Back on the Station, the figure was feverishly typing in new commands, searching, searching...
They wanted you, she thought. They wanted to capture you, harvest your life force and energy. They thought they could follow. But they didn’t know we would disappear into the Vortex.
The TARDIS hummed in agreement.
There’s more, Rose thought. Again, the TARDIS agreed.
The tracer had released something into the time ship, something that would freeze her systems, rendering her inert. Easy to pick up that way, Rose thought. The TARDIS had known, as soon as they dematerialized and felt her systems being overtaken. She had protected herself the only way she could, by putting them in a repeating loop. She’d had the barest slivers of a second to calculate it and put it into action before she was unable to function. She created a self-contained span of relative time, so Rose and the Doctor weren’t frozen too.
Rose dove back into the ship, letting herself merge with the TARDIS and spread out among the filaments of transdimensional space as well as the more mundane conduits of power. She found the places where the tracer’s virus attacked the ship’s coding. They were dark threads among the gold. She could remove them, make them vanish as if they’d never been, but she didn’t know what it would do to the ship.
The TARDIS showed her an image. She could both see it and feel it all around her. It was a console room, but not the one she knew.
Where is this?
Deep inside, hidden away. Stored. A memory, a copy. Rose laughed. It felt strange. It had been so long since she felt the urge.
We need to reboot you from a previous version. Like a computer.
The TARDIS sang with joy and relief in her mind.
Show me how to get there.
Rooms and corridors, circuits and wires. And then she was there. The room was static but warm. To the side sat an armchair with an elegant floor lamp next to it. The time rotor before her looked like blown glass. The console itself was neatly laid out with rows of buttons and dials. None of its parts had been replaced with whatever the Doctor had on hand. She figured it must be from before the Time War to be so pristine.
What must I do?
The ship showed her, walked her through each step. She remembered to burn away the tracer before she left the ship’s consciousness. It wouldn’t do to allow this to happen again.
She didn’t know if they could safeguard the TARDIS against this happening again either, but the ship thrummed inside her and she got the feeling that she wouldn’t forget this and would take her own steps to prevent it from recurring. Distantly Rose felt the Doctor’s frantic reach for her telepathically. She sent back reassurance and love to him. She was almost done. Soon it would be like this never happened...other than the memories they’d collected and made.
She entered the sequence and pulled the lever to begin it. Everything went dark. It was as empty and stark as the Zero Room. But there! A spark of light, joined by another and another. Soon the console glowed with life and the rotor started to move. Rose felt the golden power of the TARDIS recede from her skull and out through her hands where they rested on the glass casing that held the time rotor. She could hear the Doctor calling for her, his footsteps pounding on the corridor that led to this place in the belly of the ship. She smiled.
---
“You know, you should think of it like a vaccination,” Rose said, sitting in the jump seat and watching the Doctor fiddle with the cord that ran from the console out to the bay where they were docked on Alpino, an asteroid shipyard. “She just needs a booster now and then.”
“I can’t believe it was that simple. A virus.” He frowned, mostly at himself, she guessed. “I can be a right idiot, you know that? You even asked if she was sick. Right at the beginning of the loops.”
“So why didn’t it show up when you scanned her?”
“Out of date software.” He tossed the sonic up in the air and caught it. “All fixed now, though.”
Rose got up and wandered out of the doors to watch the busy mechanics as they worked on various vessels of all shapes and sizes. It was still good to be able to do that and she took a deep breath just because she could. Motor oil and engine grease never smelled so good. Nor did it appear to have changed at any point in however many centuries they were in the future from her own. Alpino specialized in repairs and modifications, and all of them were Shadow Proclamation approved.
“So, what did we learn?” she asked over her shoulder at the Doctor in a teasing tone.
He glared at her, but answered gamely enough. “No more Heroxia Station.”
“No more black markets anywhere or when,” she shot back. “Even I know you don’t take that risk. ‘S no different than clicking a dodgy link. Eh, I suppose nobody’s perfect, not even you.”
He chuckled as he came up behind her. He rested his chin on her shoulder. “Where do ya wanna go when we’re done here?”
“Oh, I dunno. I’m desperate to see Mum. But I think first, somewhere we can run. We both need to stretch our legs a little after all that.”
The Doctor laughed, and she joined him. In her head, the TARDIS hummed happily. When the modifications were complete, they unhooked the cord that attached to Alpino’s upgrade center and closed the doors. The Doctor set coordinates and flipped the lever to dematerialize. The TARDIS gave a wheeze – and since both of them felt her presence strongly in their heads, they weren’t worried – and the Doctor lifted a rubber mallet. He whacked the console and they were off.
Rose stifled a snort. “All those years in the Academy and you hit her with a hammer. Did you ever actually learn to drive?”
“Oi! All those years in the Academy to know where to hit her with a hammer. Important distinction.”
“Fine, superior Time Lord. Just don’t forget which one of us got us out of this mess.”
All the mirth bled from his expression, although his eyes were still warm and loving on hers. “Don’t worry, Rose. I won’t.”