Title: Phantom

Genre: Angst, Romance, Drama

Rating: PG-13

Couple: Ten/Rose

Spoilers: Spoilers for season 2 through Doomsday

Summary: Hope. Simultaniously Humanity's greatest strength and greatest weakness. He might have said it was impossible, but he had also taught Rose not to believe in that word. Not even if it destroyed her. Post Doomsday.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4



Disclaimer: I'd be in trouble for ruining plots if I owned DW.

AN: Huzzah! The plots finally starting to get rolling!

---

Phantom

Chapter 5: Zero Hour



"There's still a Torchwood open for business..." She tried to smile, but it did not come out right at all through her cracking voice and building tears. "I think I know a thing or two about aliens."

Such pride glowed in his eyes, such a willful projection of happiness. How he wanted her to be happy...she knew it. But how could she be happy when she knew he had no one left to hold his hand, no one more to look to. No one to save him from himself.

"Rose Tyler. Defender of the Earth!"

Not the galaxy, not the universe, not time, not anything anymore but a little ball of mud spinning in a galaxy she didn't even know, populated with people who never even wanted to have the slightest clue that there was something out there beyond what their mundane and limited lives gave them.

And oh, how she hated it.


She frowned at the screen. "What exactly am I supposed to be looking for, Doctor?"

"Ahh...well..." He frowned a minute. "Fluctuations. Of any kind, really."

"I'm not seeing any, Doctor." She huffed, watching another loop of the same readings playing over and over again.

"You're not looking hard enough." He insisted rather impatiently, then pointed at a spot near the bottom of the screen. "There. See that spike? That's the TARDIS."

"But that's--"

"Rose, Torchwood has nice toys, but they're still just apes with sticks." He sighed. "Its almost not acute enough to make out the signal, but there it is."

Nodding a bit reluctantly, she pointed at the area he had pointed. "That's it."

The assistant scrunched up his face. "That's far within the 2.0 MWBs error range due to interference from devices set up around the rift."

She shook her head. "This equipment isn't good enough to accurately detect things halfway stuck in the Void. That's it."

The man gave a look that questioned what she could have been looking for, before shaking his head, and pointing at the part of the screen both she and the Doctor had earlier. "That's not even patterned or vaguely uniform! Its completely erratic. That's just the unstable nature of the rift itself."

"So now apes are the masters of pattern recognition!" The Doctor remarked over her shoulder, voice thick with sarcasm.

She narrowed her eyes at the man. "I should know what the rift gives off. That's different."

"Its very existance demands it to be!" The man threw his hands up in exasperation. "It'll be like that today, and gone tomorrow!"

"I don't believe I was looking for your opinion!" She snapped, hands in a white-knuckled grip around the laptop in front of her. "Get the sensors attuned to that signal!"

"You don't understand...if we turn them on that high, it'll be like turning up a headset mic and using it to record a conference!" The man said in an antagonized shout. "We'll pick up all sorts of loud and annoying snores, and almost none of the words the man is speaking!"

"Then I suggest you find a way to filter it better." She said cooly. "Because I need that signal stronger if I'm going to do anything."

"Anything about what?"

"Nothing you have security clearence for." She retorted. "Now get back to work!"

The Doctor made an amused noise in his throat as the man finally sulked off. "Rose Tyler...a regular slave driver, you are."

She sniffed. "I'm tired of being treated like I'm crazy just because a certain Time Lord didn't get a move on fast enough."

He snorted. "Now you're blaming me for a few nanoseconds?"

"A TARDIS is only as good as her driver."

He rolled her eyes. "Oh no, you did not just try an turn my ship against me, too!"

She smirked and stuck her tongue out at him. "Don't say ya don't deserve it."

--

Jake cut off in the middle of whatever it was he had been saying. "You're not listening to me, are you?"

"Don't be daft!" Mickey glared at his friend. "'Course I am!"

"Tell me one word--One. Word. of what I just said."

"Ah..." Mickey frowned a moment. What was a common word? "I."

"Liar."

"Oy! Now who's lyin?!" Mickey snorted. "You don't go one sentence without sayin' that!"

Jake rolled his eyes. "If I was boring you, you could've said so, instead of lettin' me waste my breath!"

"That's not it..." He sighed, guilty now for allowing his thoughts about Rose to distract him from his friend. She was fine. She had to be.

Jake looked across the table at him skeptically. "Then what's eatin' you?"

Mickey looked down at the empty plate of food in front of him a few moments. Jake was his best friend, they'd been through more crisises than most people would like to imagine. (Though, compared to people like Rose or the Doctor what he did was child's play) Maybe he could trust him with this? After all, even Jackie said he was almost family.

With a sigh, Mickey looked up and opened his mouth to tell his friend. Jake was quicker to speak, however, looking immensely pleased.

"What'd I tell ya? I can too go a sentence without saying 'I'!"

--

The man sighed as he thumbed through the pages of the new 'readouts'. They were gibberish. Complete and utter gibberish. Not even Plato could draw meaning out of it. Anything meaningful had been choked by the absurd abundance of interference that he had told her would be there.

Still...when he handed the paper over--after she mumbled a few things under her breath, she seemed quite pleased. And he had seen her interacting with someone or something that simply wasn't there. No scan detected it. Nothing in the room could have even possibly have been used as a communication device. There was no rift-residue from something that might have come through.

There wasn't even an odd report anywhere in the city this whole week. Nothing. So...obviously...his boss had chosen today of all days to completely unwind. To go absolutely batshit. And to waste his entire day on some mindless drivel that might or might not have any meaning whatsoever.

Great. And he thought Tuesday had been a bad day.

--

He frowned over her shoulder as she leafed through the pages.

"So I'm hoping you can make anything out of this?" She said dryly, looking over at him.

"Of course I can!" He looked affronted.

"So what'm I supposed to do?"

"Dunno."

She rolled her eyes. "Brilliant."

"I can say this, though, Arturo was right about it only holding up another day."

"Arthur."

He grinned at her, before fiddling with his glasses and turning back to the sheets of paper in her hands. "There's just not enough residual energy to keep the small crack in reality open any longer without forcing it--and doing alotta damage in the process."

She frowned. "How'd it get there?"

"Oh, you know...something to do with residue from the sealing last year. It was much bigger when I got stuck in it." He grinned at her. "Don't worry, Rose. I'm not gonna do anything that would endanger the universe!"

"What if it closes?"

He blew air through his lips in a huff. "Oh, I supose the TARDIS would lose its anchor, and we'd both tumble into the void."

Color drained from her face.

A firm, unnaturally hot hand squeezed her shoulder, and he pinned her with an intense stare. "That won't happen, Rose."

--

Jackie paced the considerable length of the living room, hefting her phone in one hand, trying to remember another person she could call to talk to insanity simply to get her mind off the fact that her daughter was running late again. She was off work at 7--it was already 9 o'clock, and not even a phone call.

"Jackie..." Her husband sighed softly, worry etched deep in his dark eyes as he looked up at her from the couch. "All that worrying isn't going to help you any..."

"Oh, Pete..." She threw herself onto the couch next to him, wringing the phone in her hands nervously. "I'm so worried...."

A strong arm encircled her shoulders, and pulled her close in a reassuring embrace. "It'll be okay, Jacks...our daughter is stronger than she looks. I know she'll pull through this."

She smiled gratefully up at him, but did not feel very reassured. "I...I just wish I could help her..."

--

Rose groaned as she thumped her head on her wooden desk, listening to the way its low thud reverberated through the now almost-empty Torchwood Tower. All day, and it seemed like they were no where closer to finding a way to pry open the rift just enough to let him through, without doing permanant damage, before midnight.

She glanced up at the clock, and felt her heart lurch. 11:50. "Oh, god..."

The Doctor looked up from the sheets of information she'd arrayed on a nearby table. (He couldn't touch anything but her on his own, so the only real way to combine their efforts was to set everything up so he could see it at once.) The frown of concentration he was wearing deepened to something very grave when he followed her gaze.

He gave a soft laugh. "Looks like time's up."

"No!" She snapped, glaring at him. She wouldn't give up. Not again. This wouldn't become just another sad goodbye...she refused to let time beat her again.

Perhaps her expression showed her sentiments--or perhaps he could read some of her thoughts being in her mind, but his frown softened to that same sad look he had so long ago.

She looked away from him deliberately. "We've still got 10 minutes. We can do this."

"Even if we did, even if we found a way to do it in the next instant, it takes a half hour to get from here to the rift."

"Not if its something we can do here!" She insisted furiously, still refusing to look up at him. Because if she saw him again like she had seen him in Norway, she would have to admit it really was over. That she would have to say goodbye again. Really say goodbye. That he was going to die, and she would have to watch.

Hot tears burned her cheeks as she flipped through pages, barely even able to read them before she discarded them as useless.

"Rose!" A hand cupped her cheek and pulled her face toward his. His expression was completely unreadable to her, as he stared down at her face in silence a few moments. Maybe he was memorizing her face, wanting to think of her as his last thoughts. Maybe he couldn't read her mind, and was trying.

"Doctor..." He voice was as choked as it had been once, so long ago.

"I lost you twice, Rose." He said softly. "I thought both times I was never going to see you, and yet...here you are." There was that strange mix of happiness and sadness in the smile that appeared on his face.

"I don't want to lose you again..." She whispered, not bothering to hide the tears this time.

"Even legends come to an end, Rose." He ran a thumb across her cheek lightly, to smear away a tear. "I'm thankful more than anything, that I get a chance to say goodbye again. Properly this time. Not alot of people get that chance."

She gave a small laugh, but it sounded more like a sob than anything else. Here he was. It was everything she had asked for that day in Norway. She could hold him, he could hold her. She got one more chance to say goodbye. And all she could think about was how she wanted just a little longer.

"I guess it really is my last chance this time." He grinned. "I've never heard of Third Chances, have you?"

She shook her head. "But...you'll..."

His hand moved to cover her mouth, and he shook his head. "Don't. I knew it could come to this when I decided to try."

She sniffled back further tears, and chewed her bottom lip as she looked up into his dark eyes, so full of sadness, of intensity, of hope, of love. Why did your nose always run when you cried? It was horribly unladylike.

His hand moved to the side of her face again, and the other came up to capture her in his grip, as if she might actually try and break his impossible gaze. "I'm going to do it properly this time, Rose. And you of all people should know...nothing in this universe or any other is going to keep me from saying what I damn well want to say."

----

AN: I love Jake. No malice was meant with my poking at him. And yes...MUCH longer chapter this time, to keep up with my schedule.

And before you shoot me, I should tell you....I have a force-sheild, and I am not afraid to use it.