Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Cracks Between Worlds
Chapter Text
Morning in the Tyler household began, as ever, with the smell of burnt toast & Jackie shouting.
Sunlight bled in through half-drawn curtains, turning the pale walls gold & warm. The comforting sound of the radio murmured from the kitchen, some breezy pop song from the early 2000s , mixed with the hum of the kettle preparing for its fifth round of the day. Somewhere overhead, small feet thudded against the floorboards in gleeful chaos.
John Noble, the Metacrisis Doctor, stood in front of the toaster like it was a hostile alien lifeform, squinting at the controls.
“Didn’t I fix this yesterday?” he muttered under his breath, twisting the dial back & forth. “Or was that, last Tuesday?” A black puff of smoke hissed up from the slot. The toast launched itself into the air like a missile & clattered onto the counter, charred nearly beyond recognition. John winced, flapping a tea towel at the smoke alarm as it let out a protesting beep. “Toast. One of Earth’s great mysteries. I can reverse-engineer a vortex manipulator with a paperclip but toast?” He held the slice up with dramatic sorrow. “Beyond me.”
From the doorway, Rose leaned on the frame with a lopsided smile, arms tucked into her soft pink dressing gown.
“Should’ve let Mum do it.”
“Let Jackie near a toaster & we’d need the fire brigade on speed dial,” he said, opening the kitchen window with one hand & fumbling for the butter with the other. “Besides, I was trying to be romantic. Thought I’d make you breakfast.”
“Burnt offerings,” Rose quipped, moving to his side & stealing the good half of his second, slightly-less-blackened toast. He didn’t mind. Not really. Her presence next to him was enough to make even failure taste a bit sweeter. Jackie’s voice pierced the morning calm from the hallway like a foghorn.
“TONY! Shoes! Where are your shoes?!”
“I left them in the loo!” came the small, muffled reply.
“Well they’d better not be in the loo, because if I have to clean bog water off your school socks again!” Rose chuckled under her breath.
“Morning chaos. We should bottle it.” John grinned, sliding the kettle toward her.
“Tea, madam?”
“You offering or just handing me the kettle?”
“I’m delegating,” he said with a wink, then leaned against the kitchen counter & sighed. “You know, it’s all very domestic, isn’t it?” Rose took 2 mugs from the cupboard, her smile dimming slightly.
“Yeah. That’s what we wanted. Normal life. Family. No invasions. No near-death experiences before lunch.” She didn’t mean it sarcastically not entirely but there was a wistfulness in her tone. A longing tucked away behind the simple clink of spoons. John studied her. The way she looked out the kitchen window between pouring milk into mugs. The way her eyes drifted skyward, not just looking at the clouds but through them. Past them.
“You miss it,” he said quietly. She didn’t answer straight away. Just stirred her tea. The silence between them was soft, not uncomfortable but full of things unsaid.
“Sometimes,” she admitted finally, not quite looking at him. “Not the danger. Not the running but... the stars. The noise. The feeling that anything could happen — any moment. It was scary, yeah.. but it was also alive.”
John nodded, tapping his fingers absently against the counter. “Yeah. I get that. I feel it too.”
She turned to him, frowning slightly. “You do?”
He offered her a small, weary smile — the kind that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Even here, in this peaceful pocket of the universe, I still dream in Dalek voices sometimes. Still feel like I’ve forgotten something important. Like we stopped moving & the universe just... kept going without us.”
She reached for his hand, lacing her fingers with his. “We haven’t stopped. We’re just... resting. Catching our breath.”
“But for how long?” he murmured, mostly to himself.
At that moment, Jackie burst in like a rhinestone-clad tornado, heels clacking & mascara wand in hand.
“Rose, have you seen my? Oh, finally someone’s put the kettle on.” She scooped up her handbag, checked her lipstick in the toaster reflection (grimaced at the soot) & huffed. “Tony, if you don’t get your coat on in the next 10 seconds, we’re taking the hoverboard to school & I mean it!” Tony skidded into the kitchen, hair still wet, coat half on, socks mismatched.
“I’m ready!”
“You’ve got toothpaste on your nose.”
“I like it there.”
John laughed, handing him a napkin.
“Good lad.”
As Jackie hustled Tony toward the door, barking final orders & kisses goodbye in the same breath, a fragile kind of quiet fell over the kitchen once more. Rose & John stood together by the window, tea in hand, the last echoes of the morning storm fading behind them.
“It’s peaceful,” she whispered.
“Too peaceful,” he said & somewhere beyond the veil of the sky — something stirred.
***
In the depths of a forgotten sector of the cosmos — where stars had long since died & space itself seemed to hold its breath — there pulsed a single, flickering light.
It came from deep within the twisted bowels of a derelict Time Agency bunker, abandoned after the Time War & buried beneath layers of space-time distortion. Now, it had become something else — something far worse. A laboratory of cruelty. A shrine to ambition & at its heart: him.
The Master stood at the centre of a warped control room, encircled by coils of stolen Time Lord tech, their innards rewired with grotesque precision. Arcs of unstable energy sparked from one console to another, illuminating his sharp features with flashes of cold blue light.
He moved with theatrical grace, coat flaring behind him as he circled a humming vortex chamber, its containment field trembling. Inside it: a tear: jagged, wild & glowing with the light of another world. Pete’s World.
“Beautiful,” he whispered, almost reverently. His voice curled with venomous delight. “All that effort the Time Lords poured into sealing it off & all it took was a little stolen knowledge, a few Dalek scraps & the right amount of madness.”
The Master chuckled darkly, low & guttural, as he tapped at the console. The swirling breach stabilised further, forming the unmistakable shimmer of a dimensional rift. A doorway.
“& there you are,” he breathed, eyes locking on the flickering image now blooming before him, a golden-haired woman in a pink robe, smiling faintly as she poured tea in a kitchen that stank of comfort & banality. “Rose Tyler. Still playing house. Still pretending.”
He sneered, fingers twitching as he resisted the urge to reach through the screen.
“You thought you were safe,” he whispered to her image. “You thought you were free of me of him but I’m not the past, my dear. I’m the end & now I’ve found the crack in your fairytale.”
With a final twist of the controls, the rift exploded outward in a controlled implosion folding itself into a narrow, pulsing corridor of shifting light.
The Master’s eyes blazed.
“No more waiting.”
He stepped forward into the vortex.
***
In a rusting industrial corridor beneath a chemical plant on the fringes of Pete’s London, a ripple tore through the shadows. For a moment, the air warped — screaming silently — as reality shuddered to accommodate something it should never have allowed.
A figure emerged from the tear. Elegant, poised & utterly wrong.
The Master stood in the gloom, straightening his lapels with deliberate care. His boots echoed against the cold metal floor, slow & measured. The air crackled faintly around him, reality still stitching itself shut in his wake. He drew a breath, savouring it then exhaled slowly.
“Ah, parallel air. Slightly more nitrogen. Slightly less ambition.” He moved like a shadow with purpose, disappearing into the maze of corridors, his footsteps leaving nothing behind but dread. Outside, the city shimmered with early morning light, unaware of the sickness now threading its way through the seams of its world. From across the street, hidden in the shade of a shadowed alley, the Master watched her. Rose. She stood in the sunlight, laughing softly as she handed her little brother his forgotten lunchbox through the car window. The Metacrisis Doctor leaned against the wall beside her, smiling with the kind of casual affection that made the Master’s lip curl. “Domestic bliss,” he hissed, loathing thick in his voice. “How utterly vile.” His hand hovered above a sleek, humming device strapped to his wrist. a stolen creation of both Gallifreyan design & something far more primitive. “She won’t be laughing for long.” & with that, the Master melted back into the shadows unseen but not unfelt. Something was coming & it had already arrived.
Chapter 2: Chapter 2: The Disappearance
Summary:
One moment she was there—then she was gone.
Chapter Text
It started as a faint buzz — a strange static that made the hairs on the back of John’s neck bristle.
He was elbow-deep in wiring in the garden shed, fiddling with a compact, jury-rigged dimensional sensor he’d been working on since that uneasy morning. It had been humming on & off all week but now it screamed to life, a shrill mechanical whine echoing through the shed like a banshee.
The screen blinked furiously — red, then violet. Unstable dimensional energy. Impossibly close.
“No, no, that’s too near— that’s impossibly near,” John muttered, his voice strained with disbelief. He thumped the side of the device. “This can’t be right. Unless—”
A deep, guttural thrummm vibrated through the ground, accompanied by a sudden pressure shift in the air — like the universe itself was holding its breath.
John’s stomach dropped.
“Rose.”
He was already moving, heart thundering against his ribs as he tore out of the shed, scanning frantically for her. The garden blurred past as his legs pumped furiously, feet crunching gravel in a wild sprint toward the drive.
& then he saw her.
Rose. Laughing softly, crouched in front of Tony, straightening the boy’s jacket collar. Her golden hair caught in the breeze, sunlight dancing across her face.
“ROSE! GET AWAY FROM HIM!” John bellowed.
She blinked, startled, looking up at the sound of his voice — & in that moment, reality split.
A horrific screech tore through the quiet suburb as the air behind her fractured open, a jagged, unnatural wound blooming with light & swirling smoke. It pulsed like a heartbeat, hissing & spitting sparks. The wind howled, furious & unrelenting, as time & space twisted themselves into a vortex.
Tony screamed. Jackie let out a shriek from the car. “ROSE?! WHAT IS THAT?!”
From the heart of the dimensional breach, a figure stepped through with serpentine grace. Cloaked in black, his presence warped the air around him like a living storm.
The Master.
His expression curled into a smirk of chilling satisfaction. “Hello, Rose. Did you miss me?”
Before she could even scream, his hand darted forward with inhuman speed, seizing her arm in a steel grip.
Rose’s eyes widened in horror. “No! No— John—!”
She reached out, fingers stretching toward her brother, toward the man she loved — her free hand brushing Tony’s arm. The child froze in place, too terrified to move.
“ROSE!” John roared, leaping forward, skidding on the gravel as he hurled himself toward her.
“Let her GO!” he shouted, fury & fear rippling through every muscle.
But he was too late.
With a violent pull & a flare of burning white light, the breach yawned wider — & Rose was ripped from the world.
Gone.
Just like that.
The portal slammed shut behind her with a deafening crack, sending a shockwave outward. John was thrown off his feet, flung backward with brutal force. He crashed hard into the bonnet of Jackie’s car, denting the metal, before crumpling to the driveway, dazed & gasping for air.
The quiet that followed was deafening.
Tony stood in the middle of the drive, eyes glazed with shock, lip trembling.
“Where... where did she go?” he whispered hoarsely. “She— she was just there—!”
Jackie stumbled from the car, wild-eyed & shaking.
“Rose?! ROSE?! Where are you?! What the bloody hell just happened?!”
John groaned, dragging himself upright, blood trickling down the side of his face, pain burning through his shoulder but it was nothing compared to the twisting, suffocating agony blooming in his chest.
“She’s gone,” he rasped, staring at the place where she’d vanished. “He took her.”
Jackie turned on him, panic turning to fury. “What do you mean, gone?! Who took her? What just— what just happened in front of my house?!”
John’s eyes didn’t move. They stayed fixed on the still-sparking scorch marks in the gravel.
“The Master,” he said hoarsely. “He’s back.”
& then, more quietly, as the reality sank in like lead:
“He’s taken Rose.”
***
The silence left in Rose’s absence was unbearable.
It wasn’t a peaceful quiet — it was thick, paralysing, filled with the phantom echo of her scream, the electric hum of the breach, the thunderous final crack as the rift sealed shut. The scent of burning ozone still lingered in the air, sharp & acrid, mingling with the faint warmth of sun on stone.
Then — chaos.
“ROSE! ROSE!” Jackie’s voice shattered the stillness, raw & wailing, as she stumbled across the drive. Her heels clacked violently against the gravel as she dropped to her knees, fingers clawing at the spot where her daughter had just been. “Where is she?! What was that?! Where’s my baby?!”
Her voice cracked. She sobbed — loud, broken, helpless.
Tony began to cry too, soft & confused, his little face crumpling as he clutched his schoolbag like a lifeline.
“Where did Rose go?” he whimpered, looking between the adults, his voice shaking. “Is she hiding? Is it a game?”
Pete ran out of the house, already on his mobile.
“Yes, it’s Pete Tyler. Code White. I repeat, Code White. We’ve had a breach. No, right outside the bloody house” He turned, his eyes flicking from Jackie’s collapsed form to John crumpled, ghost-pale, bleeding. “She’s gone. Rose is gone!” The words hit the air like a slap.
John was on his knees, hands trembling, knuckles white as they dug into the gravel. He stared at the empty space where Rose had vanished, the image of her terrified face replaying on a loop behind his eyes. He’d seen her go. He’d failed her.
“No, I should’ve, I should’ve got to her” he gasped, throat tight. “I was too slow. I knew something was wrong this morning & I ignored it. I let him take her…” His voice cracked, breaking under the weight of guilt. A dry sob tore from his throat as he hunched forward, forehead pressing to the ground. The blood on his temple smeared across the gravel but he didn’t notice. He didn’t care.
Jackie flung herself at Pete, fists pounding his chest. “DO something! You work with Torchwood— you’ve got resources, you’ve got people! You said this world was supposed to be safe! You promised me!”
“I know, Jacks, I know,” Pete choked, grabbing her wrists, holding her tight as tears sprang in his own eyes. “I’ve got them scanning now. We’ll find her. We will. I swear it.” Tony crept closer to John, who hadn’t moved. The boy reached out a trembling hand & tugged gently at his sleeve.
“Is Rose coming back?” he asked quietly, voice so small it barely reached the air. John lifted his head slowly, eyes rimmed red, every muscle in his face drawn tight with pain.
“I don’t know,” he said, barely able to form the words. The child’s lip quivered & he looked back at the spot where his sister had stood, where the sun now shone innocently across the drive like nothing had happened but everything had changed. The Tyler household, once a place of warmth & laughter, had cracked open & in that moment, they were not a powerful family. Not heroes of a parallel Earth. They were just a broken family. Desperate. Grieving. Powerless & in another world, Rose was alone.
***
Darkness.
Heavy, suffocating darkness, thick as fog & cloying like smoke, curled around her like a shroud. The first thing Rose became aware of was the cold. It wasn’t just physical. It was a surgical kind of cold, metallic & lifeless, seeping through her skin as though the very air had been drained of warmth & hope. She tried to move. Her wrists jerked against resistance. Cold metal bit into her skin. Chains.
Her breathing hitched: shallow, sharp, panicked.
She opened her eyes.
Flickering lights buzzed overhead, casting a dim, sickly-green hue across the chamber. The ceiling above her was curved, ribbed with dark conduits that pulsed slowly, as though the building itself were alive. Tubes glistened with a golden substance that moved like fire trapped in liquid. Her limbs were bound. Arms spread, ankles shackled to a slab of reinforced steel that hummed with a low, unholy vibration beneath her.
“Wha?” Her voice cracked, hoarse & small, like it didn’t belong to her anymore. “Hello?” she tried, louder this time. “Is anyone?”
The silence was shattered by a chilling, mechanical rasp that echoed all around her — nowhere & everywhere at once.
“THE HYBRID SHALL RISE.”
Rose’s heart nearly stopped. That voice. Cold. Cruel. Dalek. She jolted violently against the restraints, thrashing instinctively — wrists bruising beneath steel cuffs, breath coming in shallow bursts. Her pulse pounded in her ears like war drums.
“No, it can’t be” she gasped. “They were destroyed. You were all gone!”
From the shadows of the chamber, shapes began to shift. One by one, the outlines of Daleks emerged from the gloom, rolling silently into view like ghosts of a nightmare. Their armoured casings gleamed in the flickering light, eyestalks glowing a deathly blue, each movement precise & mechanical.
“THE HYBRID SHALL RISE. SHE WILL RULE ALL REALITIES.”
A high-pitched whine filled the chamber. The ceiling split open, releasing a spider-like contraption of metal limbs, wires & surgical tubing that descended slowly, dripping fluid & sparking faintly. Rose’s entire body went rigid, panic coursing through her like lightning.
“Let me go!” she cried out, eyes wide with terror. “What are you doing to me?!”
From the shadows, another figure stepped forward. The Master. He was immaculate, unnervingly calm, hands folded behind his back like a proud conductor before a grand symphony. He smirked down at her, utterly delighted.
“Oh Rose, did you really think your story ended in that pretty little parallel world?” he purred. “You were made for so much more.” She stared at him, revulsion & betrayal burning in her chest.
“You’re mad.” He leaned in close, his breath warm against her cheek, his words a silken hiss.
“Not mad, my dear. Evolved.” Above them, the mechanical crown of wires & metal lowered steadily, shadows writhing across Rose’s pale face as the Daleks began their chant again.
“THE HYBRID SHALL RISE. THE HYBRID SHALL RISE.”
She screamed, not just in fear but in rage as the cold metal touched her skin & far above, in another world, a broken man worked desperately to bring her home.
Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Below The Surface
Summary:
Underground, something ancient stirs. Above, hearts break.
***
Chapter Text
Rose drifted in & out of consciousness, her thoughts fractured, her senses dulled. Her mind felt clouded, like she was submerged beneath deep water — voices reached her distorted & distant, movements blurred at the edges. A dull ache throbbed behind her eyes & her limbs, though heavy, trembled faintly.
She was drugged.
The taste of copper clung to her tongue. Her mouth was dry, her skin clammy. Her muscles twitched involuntarily against cold, metallic restraints. They bound her with precision, wrists & ankles locked against the surgical table, a reinforced slab angled slightly upright, displaying her like an offering.
The light above her was blindingly white, sterile, pulsing in sync with the low mechanical hum vibrating through the chamber walls. The scent of oil & burning ozone hung thick in the air — invasive, bitter.
Somewhere deeper in the room, machinery groaned to life. Hissing. Clicking. The cold, guttural drone of Dalek speech echoed faintly from beyond the walls like an unholy chant growing louder.
“PREPARE THE SUBJECT. INITIATE STABILISATION SEQUENCE.”
She flinched.
Her head lolled weakly to the side, vision struggling to focus — but she could just make out the monstrous silhouette of Daleks surrounding her, their eye-stalks aimed directly at her face. Their lights blinked rhythmically, in perfect, terrifying unison.
“THE HYBRID MUST BE STABLE. SHE WILL RULE ALL UNIVERSES.”
Tubes hissed open overhead.
One slid down, inserting into a socket that had been fused — forcibly — against her forearm. A new rush of icy liquid coursed into her veins. Her breath hitched, her heart stuttered. Her muscles locked up before relaxing again, sluggish & uncooperative.
The drugs were recalibrating her.
Changing her.
She tried to scream — but her throat only let out a hoarse whisper. “Stop… please…”
& then he stepped forward.
The Master.
Dressed in a crisp black coat that clung to his frame like shadow, his boots echoed softly against the steel flooring as he approached her. His eyes gleamed & his smile curled with something sickeningly sweet.
“Rose,” he said softly, almost tenderly, as if greeting an old friend. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited to see you like this.” She forced her eyes open, blinking through the fog, her voice barely audible.
“You did this.”
“I did,” he replied, unapologetic. “But you’ll thank me for it. In time.” He raised a hand & brushed a stray strand of damp hair from her face, the gesture mockingly gentle. She recoiled as much as her restraints would allow. “Such fire in you still,” he murmured, admiring her with a twisted fascination. “Even drugged. Even chained. That’s why they chose you. Why I chose you.” He turned toward the Daleks. “She’s strong,” he announced. “Her will is iron, her mind, beautifully complex. She was always more than human. Now she’ll be, perfect.”
“SHE WILL BE OUR QUEEN. OUR VOICE. OUR WEAPON.”
Mechanical arms extended from the ceiling. One held a gleaming device resembling a twisted crown, its spines alive with writhing cables. Another brandished a scalpel, fine as a whisper but cold as death. Tears welled in Rose’s eyes, slipping silently down her cheeks.
“You don’t have to do this.” she rasped, desperate. The Master leaned in & for a fleeting moment, the mask of cruelty slipped. There was something else there : obsession, madness & a flicker of something dangerously close to affection.
“But I want to,” he whispered. Then, he stepped back. The machines descended & the screams began.
***
The Torchwood command hub pulsed with frantic energy — a warren of glass panels, metallic catwalks & glowing interfaces that buzzed with encoded data. Monitors flickered with graphs & spatial readings, the constant churn of alerts & notifications underscoring the rising tension in the room.
John paced the grated floor like a caged animal, eyes wild with exhaustion & desperation. His hair was a tousled mess, his shirt clinging damply to his back beneath his brown coat. He hadn’t stopped moving since Rose vanished — hadn’t eaten, hadn’t rested. His fingers twitched constantly, either adjusting controls or tapping at his temple as if trying to force a solution out of his fractured mind.
Pete Tyler stood beside him, composed but grim, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. Though his expression was steady, his knuckles had gone white from the pressure. Around them, Torchwood technicians scrambled between terminals, speaking in hushed, urgent voices.
“Breach was unnatural,” John muttered, staring at a rotating 3D map of the multiverse displayed mid-air in a blue holographic sphere. “It didn’t occur. It was ripped. Torn open & then stitched shut again.”
He turned sharply to one of the techs. “Has the trace signature stabilised yet?”
The technician nodded nervously. “Yes, sir. Temporal residue is spiking around a fixed coordinate — twenty-seven degrees off the base frequency of our dimension. Someone brought tech through that doesn’t belong.”
Pete moved closer to the screen, brow furrowed. “Could it be… him?”
John exhaled shakily, his voice hollow. “The Master. I’d bet both hearts on it — if I still had both. It’s his style. Loud. Chaotic. Arrogant. He doesn’t just slip in, Pete. He announces himself.”
Another tech, a young woman with cropped blonde hair, turned in her chair. “Sir, there’s something else. We’re detecting heavy temporal displacement.. but not just around the breach.”
She tapped a control & another display lit up — a web of golden threads spiralling outwards, converging on a single point.
“Dalek energy,” she said quietly. “We think they’re involved.”
The words hit the room like a gunshot.
Pete’s expression darkened. “I thought they were gone.”
“So did I,” John replied coldly. “But they always find a way back, like rot in the foundation & if they’ve got Rose—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. His jaw clenched. His hand curled into a fist at his side.
Pete put a firm hand on his shoulder. “Then we get her back. Whatever it takes.”
John turned toward him, eyes glinting. “Then help me build something that’ll take us through the breach. Something that’ll punch a hole wide enough to storm their twisted little empire & drag her out.”
Pete nodded once. “Torchwood’s yours. Use whatever you need.”
The lights flickered overhead. Somewhere in the bowels of the Hub, the hum of machinery rose as dormant equipment powered on — an old warning siren stuttering to life. Time was running out & they both knew it.
***
Darkness lapped at the edges of her mind — relentless, oily, dragging her down.
But somewhere within the void, light flickered.
Warm. Golden. Sunlight.
The memory surged forward like a tidal wave of warmth against the cold grip of metal restraints.
She was lying on a sun-drenched hillside, her bare feet brushing soft grass as the breeze stirred her hair. The sky above her stretched wide & impossibly blue, with a scattering of cotton clouds drifting lazily overhead. Laughter danced through the air — her own, mingled with his.
“Oi!” John's voice floated to her ears, light & teasing. “That ice cream was mine, you menace.”
Rose turned her head & grinned, squinting against the sunlight. He was beside her, sprawled in the grass, shirt wrinkled & sleeves rolled. Melted vanilla ran down his fingers & he looked personally betrayed.
She giggled. “You took too long choosing. Rules are rules.”
He rolled toward her, smirking & stole a kiss off her cheek. “Greedy.”
“Slowpoke.”
They lay there for what felt like forever — a fleeting eternity sealed in laughter & sunlight. His hand found hers, their fingers tangling in easy affection, no words needed.
“D’you ever think,” she murmured, “maybe we got lucky? This world. Us.”
John’s expression softened, though his eyes betrayed a flicker of unease. “Every day.”
The wind rustled through the tall grass around them, whispering promises of peace, of future picnics & laughter & seaside walks. The world had slowed for them here. No monsters. No time wars. Just them.
But then the memory… shivered.
The wind changed.
Sunlight dimmed.
A chill crept in.
Rose blinked. John’s face began to blur — his voice distorted, slurred by an encroaching static. Her fingers twitched, now pinned down once more. The warm air was gone — replaced with sterile cold & that ever-present hum of machinery.
“No…” she breathed, trying to cling to the memory. “Not yet…”
But the drug surged in her bloodstream, a second dose triggered by unseen machinery. It pulsed through her, unravelling thought, fogging sensation, dragging her mind back into the cold, mechanical present.
Her eyes fluttered open — the slab, the chains, the Dalek chamber, the awful brightness overhead all came crashing back.
“THE MEMORY MUST BE ERASED.”
“SHE MUST EMBRACE HER DESTINY.”
“No…” she hissed, forcing her body to resist. “You’re not taking that from me.”
Her head throbbed. The machine above her sparked. The eyestalks glared. From the shadows, the Master watched.
He tilted his head slightly, the barest hint of something like admiration curling at his lips.
“Still fighting?” he murmured, voice low & silky. “Even now? Oh, Rose… you are magnificent.”
Her breath came in ragged bursts. Tears streaked her cheeks — not just from fear but from fury. She wouldn’t forget. She wouldn’t let them erase him but the drug kept working & the golden hills faded.
***
The steel chamber pulsed like a metallic womb, alive with mechanical breath. Moisture clung to the ceiling, collecting in fat droplets before falling in quiet plinks onto the bloodless floor. The stench was choking — oil, burning ozone & the sterile tang of something not quite disinfected but not quite human either. Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the Earth, this hell churned in secret.
Rose Tyler trembled violently against the slab to which she was bound, wrists rubbed raw from struggling against the reinforced restraints. The cold beneath her spine gnawed at her bones. Her legs were secured, spread slightly, locked into the rigid, surgical position that made her feel dissected before the process had even begun.
She was gagged now — not out of mercy but precision. Too much noise would distort the biofeedback but her eyes... her eyes screamed.
& the Master? Oh, he stood just out of the light, where the shadows licked around him like smoke, watching with hands loosely folded behind his back. His expression was unreadable — part wonder, part hunger, part something disturbingly close to reverence.
"You should feel honoured," he said softly, his voice dripping with silk & menace. "Most species die screaming in those chairs. You… you get to become more."
Her breath hitched. Muffled cries still escaped the gag. Her head thrashed side to side, hair damp with sweat & sticking to her temples.
“LET THE CONVERSION BEGIN.”
The machine above her roared to life.
The helmet descended slowly — deliberately — like a beast savouring the moment before the kill. From its underside, needles extended. Not sterile surgical tools — no, these were Dalek tech: crude, invasive, designed not to repair but to overwrite. Slivers of metal coiled like veins ready to burrow through her flesh. Wires flicked into readiness, tipped with tiny electrodes designed to pierce the skull & weave into the neural cortex.
The Master took a single step forward, eyes glittering. “This... is evolution, Rose.”
Her eyes widened. Her chest heaved.
“EMOTIONS DETECTED.”
“FEAR. RESISTANCE. STIMULATE COMPLIANCE.”
A hiss of gas erupted from either side of her, flooding the chamber with a sickly-sweet, narcotic-scented fog. Her head lolled for a moment, breath hitching as the drug hit her bloodstream.
Rose moaned — a raw, trembling sound that escaped despite the gag. Her limbs twitched violently.
The Master leaned close now, whispering near her ear.
"You'll forget him soon. The clone. The beach. All those memories — blurred like a dream after waking but I will remain. In every corner of your new mind."
He trailed a finger along her cheekbone. She flinched.
The helmet slammed down onto her skull with a sickening hiss.
Pain. Instant, blinding, total pain.
Rose’s entire body seized as the first jolt of electric current tore through her like lightning. It was more than physical — it violated her, reaching down through muscle & nerve & memory, unthreading everything that made her her. Her identity flickered behind her eyes like a failing light.
More needles pierced flesh — into the back of her neck, behind her ears, along her jaw.
“NEURAL MAPPING INITIATED.”
“DNA MODULATION — PROCESSING.”
Blood beaded where the cables entered. The machinery above her surged with energy. Her scream though muffled was pure agony. Her back arched off the slab, tendons straining, eyes rolling.
"Keep fighting," the Master murmured, one hand curling loosely around the rail beside her. "I love it when you fight." The bio-mechanical interfaces drilled deeper. From her forehead, a narrow, silver eyestalk slowly unfurled, oozing from the skin as if the machine had grown it inside her. Her palm split open along surgically precise lines, revealing the first glimmer of Dalek circuitry as a miniature gunstick began to assemble in her flesh. Rose whimpered, barely conscious now, her breathing shallow. Then suddenly silence. The machines powered down with an echoing groan. Smoke curled from the seams of the helmet. Her body went limp.
Chapter 4: Chapter 4: The Hybrid Queen
Summary:
She wakes but not as herself.
***
Chapter Text
The Torchwood Hub buzzed with a low, electrified hum — a living organism of screens, consoles & urgent voices, all spiralling around a single, burning mission.
Find her.
John stood hunched over the main workstation, shirt rumpled, hair a wild mess from hours of yanking his fingers through it in frustration. His eyes, bloodshot & unblinking, were locked onto the rippling holographic model of the dimensional breach flickering above the central table. Sweat glistened at his temples despite the cool, recycled air hissing from the vents overhead.
He hadn’t slept. Not really. Not since that moment — that moment — when she was ripped from his world like a loose thread unravelled from the very fabric of his heart.
“Run it again!” he barked, sharper than intended, voice cracking. “From timestamp zero. Use the refracted overlay this time. The Master’s dimensional signature has to be there somewhere!”
Jake, standing a few feet away, exchanged a quiet look with Rickey across the workstation. Both wore the same look — worry laced with helplessness.
Rickey leaned over the keyboard. “Overlay running but John—there’s a limit to how many times we can—”
“Do it!” John snapped, eyes still locked on the data.
& then — there. A flicker.
A tiny, fractured pulse of energy, shimmering just outside the recognised rift patterns.
John’s breath caught.
“Pause! Zoom. Enhance refractive spectrum. Layer seven.”
The screen shimmered again. What once looked like simple rift residue now bloomed into a jagged fissure — unnatural, stitched with erratic bursts of Time Lord tech. It pulsed, faintly, like a heartbeat. A sick, warped thing.
“There you are,” John whispered, his voice trembling with a mix of awe & dread.
The others moved in closer.
“That’s not one of ours,” Jake muttered. “Is it...?”
“No,” John said, straightening. He looked impossibly tall now, his frame tense with energy. “That’s him. That’s the Master. He’s used corrupted vortex energy fused with void matter. He didn’t just open a door — he ripped a hole.”
Pete’s voice rang from the comms, crackling through: “What does it mean? Can we follow it?”
John’s eyes gleamed, sudden & sharp.
“Yes,” he breathed. “Yes, we can.”
He darted across the room, grabbing a coil of cables & a portable vortex manipulator stripped of its safety features.
“Jake, calibrate the signal decay — I need to reverse-engineer the coordinates before it collapses. Rickey, amplify the feedback loop through the dimensional transceiver. I’m going to trace the Master’s trajectory in real time.”
Jake hesitated. “John, are you sure this isn’t going to kill you?”
He stopped for a second, blinking.
Then turned to face them all, his expression raw — not manic, not reckless but achingly human.
“She’s in pain, Jake. I felt it. The breach—it’s echoing her fear. She’s alive but not for long. If I don’t find her, no one will.”
Silence.
Then Rickey nodded grimly.
“Let’s find her.”
Machines whirred. Lights dimmed. Energy built & deep in the systems, the coordinates solidified, a location beyond space & time, buried beneath the crust of a dying parallel Earth. John whispered her name like a prayer.
“Hold on, Rose. I’m coming.”
***
The sterile underground chamber reeked of antiseptic & cold metal, its harsh fluorescent lights flickering faintly, casting long, sinister shadows across the gleaming surfaces. The air was heavy, thick with the acrid scent of burning circuits & a faint metallic tang that clung to Rose’s tongue like poison. Every breath rasped painfully, as if even oxygen rebelled against the unnatural transformation taking hold of her body.
Rose lay restrained on an angled slab, her wrists & ankles clamped in gleaming restraints that pulsed faintly in time with the Dalek core’s power. The drug coursing through her veins was insidious — thick & burning, coiling through her like black smoke, strangling thought, suffocating memory. She could feel it—feel herself slipping away, her mind turning glassy & mechanical under the pressure.
Her suit — no, her second skin — had fused to her flesh with obscene precision. At first, it had felt foreign, tight, suffocating. Now it moved with her, or rather, it moved her. A half-organic, half-synthetic weave stretched over her torso & limbs, its textures shifting in unnerving harmony with each involuntary twitch. The left side of her body retained some echo of the familiar — matte black fabric clinging to the shape of her waist & shoulder, reminiscent of her old battle jackets but the right side had become something else entirely — an armoured patchwork of chrome & Dalek bronze, marked by faintly glowing hemisphere-like nodes & microscopic conduits that pulsed with hostile energy.
She felt it under her skin: the creeping circuitry, the whisper of artificial nerves overriding her own. It wasn’t just external — the transformation burrowed deep. Muscles stiffened with unnatural resistance. Her bones felt reinforced, heavier, less hers. Her gunstick — emerging seamlessly from the palm of her right hand — thrummed, sensing motion even in the stillness. It responded to her thoughts… or perhaps she was responding to its.
Then came the final betrayal.
A sickening pressure unfurled in her skull, like fingers made of ice burrowing through her brain. The eyestalk — sleek, compact but undeniably Dalek — jolted forth from her forehead with a hiss of steam & a spasm that made her cry out. A moment later, she went utterly still. Her scream died mid-throat.
Her pupils dilated. Her breath slowed.
& then... silence.
From the far end of the chamber, Daleks glided forward from the shadows — five, no, seven of them — their gold & bronze casings gleaming malevolently beneath the harsh lights. The lead Dalek twitched, its own eyestalk adjusting, scanning her with sweeping intensity.
“SUBJECT INTEGRATION: COMPLETE,” it screeched, the sound grating, triumphant.
“FLESH ADAPTATION: 97.3%. CYBERNETIC CONVERGENCE: STABLE.”
Another one wheeled forward, its casing bearing the black markings of a Command Drone.
“INITIATE HYBRID PROTOCOL. ACTIVATE MIND LINK.”
A high-pitched screech tore through the chamber & then the Daleks felt her. Their Hive Consciousness rippled with the sudden surge of shared intelligence. Data. Memory. Identity. Conflicting strands of human emotion & Dalek logic crashed together in a silent war. The result: something neither & both.
Rose’s eyelids fluttered open & what looked out from beneath them was not wholly her. Not anymore. Her body twitched, realigning unnaturally. Her voice, when it came, carried no warmth, no inflection. Just cold, reverent finality.
“I am the Hybrid Queen. I speak for the Supreme Order. Obey me.”
A tremor of satisfaction rippled through the Dalek ranks. Not celebration for they didn’t feel joy but affirmation. Calculation. Purpose. She was theirs now. The ultimate weapon. The perfect fusion.
Their dark queen.
***
The vortex flared open like a wound in the sky, ripping through the veil between worlds with a thunderclap of cascading energy. Shattered light bled across the night-time horizon of Prime Earth — a swirl of blues, silvers & bruised violets — before collapsing in on itself with a violent snap. Where once there was nothing, now stood three men beneath a flickering streetlamp, surrounded by the quiet hum of early morning London.
John staggered slightly, clutching the vortex manipulator at his wrist, the metal casing steaming from overuse. Sweat clung to his brow, his chest heaving as he adjusted his leather coat with shaking fingers. Beside him, Ricky looked grim but composed, scanning the empty street with tense precision. Jake, fists clenched, looked ready to punch the next thing that moved.
“Well,” Jake muttered, his voice thick with restrained urgency, “that was bloody awful.”
“Welcome back,” Ricky said flatly, eyes sweeping the skyline. “Same stars. Different nightmare.”
John didn’t speak. He was already moving.
They crossed quiet roads & half-sleeping alleyways, weaving past shuttered cafés & looming council flats. The city looked deceptively calm — unaware of the threat bleeding into its very bones. Somewhere in this world, the Doctor was walking, living, unknowing & Rose—Rose was being dismantled, piece by precious piece.
John’s jaw tightened.
After half an hour of relentless tracking, the signal flared again—low & pulsing—from the psychic thread that still faintly connected him to the TARDIS. A bond forged in fire & heartbreak. They found it nestled behind a block of tenement housing, the familiar blue police box humming faintly beneath the moonlight.
Jake exhaled. “That’s her, alright.”
John stepped forward & placed a hand against the door.
It opened before he could knock.
The interior light spilled onto the pavement, warm & golden & there stood the Tenth Doctor, long coat billowing gently from the TARDIS’s ambient breeze. He stared at them in wary confusion, sonic screwdriver already raised in one hand.
John raised his hands slowly. “Doctor. It’s me.”
The Doctor’s eyes narrowed. He scanned John’s face—familiar yet not, same voice, same eyes but different. His jaw tensed.
“Metacrisis,” he muttered.
John nodded once. “We need to talk. Now.”
The Doctor looked between the three men, something in his expression hardening. “Where’s Rose?”
John flinched. It was barely perceptible but enough.
The Doctor’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Where. Is. She?”
Inside the TARDIS, the tension coiled like a spring. Screens flickered as data pinged in from John’s wrist. The TARDIS itself seemed to murmur uneasily, as if recognising a disruption too deep for logic.
“She’s gone,” John said finally, voice hoarse. “The Master broke through the dimensional wall. He crossed into Pete’s World… & he took her.”
The Doctor staggered back as if punched.
“No…”
“He brought her here,” John continued, unable to stop now. “Not just here—to them. To the Daleks. We’ve traced the signal. There’s a base beneath the crust of a scorched parallel Earth—burnt by war & time. He handed her over like a gift.”
Jake’s voice cut through the silence like glass. “They’ve turned her into something else. Hybridised her. Mechanised her.”
“Implants. Cybernetic modifications,” Ricky added, eyes flicking to the scanner. “A gunstick in her palm. An eyestalk from her head. Her DNA is still human.. but barely.”
“She called herself the Hybrid Queen,” John whispered, almost choking on the words. “She didn’t recognise me. Not properly. Her voice was... wrong. Empty.”
The Doctor’s face was unreadable but his hands shook.
“No,” he said quietly, then louder. “No. I left her with you to be safe.”
John’s expression cracked. “Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I haven’t replayed every moment—every decision—every night since? I wasn’t fast enough. I wasn’t clever enough & now she’s—she’s not Rose anymore. She’s something else.”
The Doctor looked down, the silence between them thick as storm clouds. Then, slowly, his fingers curled around the TARDIS console.
“She’s still in there,” he said at last, his voice tight with something like fury barely restrained. “If even a shred of her mind remains, we can bring her back.”
John looked at him. Really looked. The fire in the Doctor’s eyes wasn’t just anger. It was a promise.
“Then we find her,” John said.
“Before the Master uses her to burn every universe to ash,” Jake added grimly. The Doctor’s fingers danced across the controls. The engines groaned. The TARDIS prepared to move & the hunt for the Hybrid Queen began.
***
The chamber was bathed in shadow, lit only by the cold pulse of control panels & the sickly green luminescence bleeding from the Dalek consoles. The air was stale, metallic, thick with the scent of coolant & machine-oil, as if the walls themselves exhaled artificial decay.
Rose stood motionless at the heart of the room, half-shrouded in the gloom — a silhouette torn between beauty & monstrosity. Her hybridised form was an affront to nature & time: her once-golden skin now threaded with bio-mechanical circuitry that glowed faintly beneath the surface, like dying stars trapped under glass. The Dalek-styled plating across her right shoulder & down her arm caught the light with an unnatural sheen & her eyestalk — slender & slick with dark chrome — twitched mechanically, scanning every inch of the space. Her gunstick remained retracted for now, folded into the palm of her right hand like a venomous secret.
But her eyes… her human eyes, though rimmed with exhaustion & shadow, still flickered with something the Daleks couldn’t understand.
A name.
It had surfaced unbidden in her corrupted mind — a whisper, soft & sudden, like the brush of fingers she’d forgotten how to feel.
John.
The name didn’t compute. It wasn’t part of the mission parameters, nor stored in the encoded protocols forced into her brain. It came with a sharp ache in her chest, a tremor in her breath, an image — blurred but defiant — of brown eyes, a crooked smile & a laugh that once made her feel safe.
The beach. The house in Pete’s World. Mum. Tony. John...
A wave of static burned across her thoughts. The implants flared in warning, trying to suffocate the intrusion, to overwrite it with code & directives.
But she held onto it.
For just a moment longer.
The silence shattered with the tell-tale clunk-hiss of a door opening behind her. Her body twitched instinctively, realigning with Dalek efficiency. Still, her jaw clenched, resisting the obedience that came too easily.
He sauntered in like a king returning to his throne. The Master.
Dressed in a sleek black coat & gloves, he looked out of place in the industrial hell surrounding them — but his madness thrived in contrast. His eyes glittered with malice & delight as they swept across her altered form.
“My queen,” he purred, voice soaked in smug affection. “Look at you. Isn’t it delicious? Dalek precision, Time Lord design.. & the heart of a human.” He stepped closer, circling her like a vulture admiring his prize. “& what a heart it was.”
Rose didn’t move. Her face remained expressionless. Blank. Watching.
But inside, something twisted.
The Master leaned close, speaking low in her ear. “They told me you hesitated. That something flickered when they said his name. John, was it? Or was it Doctor to you? You always did love a lost cause.”
He paused, gauging her lack of reaction.
“You're not her anymore,” he said flatly, venom laced between the syllables. “You’re evolution. Perfection. The Hybrid Queen.”
Her lips parted.
There was a delay, a crackle in her throat before she spoke — & when she did, her voice came in monotone, each syllable flattened, deadened.
“I obey.”
The Master smiled. Wide. Too wide.
“Oh, Rose. You’ve made me so proud.”
Behind her, the Daleks responded with shrieks of mechanical approval. Their eyestalks spun wildly, their casings reverberating with brutal excitement.
“HYBRID QUEEN CONFIRMED. SHE IS THE SUPREME. SHE WILL LEAD.”
“ALL UNIVERSES WILL BOW.”
The Master turned to the looming broadcast device behind him. An ancient transmitter, cannibalised from Gallifreyan ruins & Dalek war tech. He pressed his hand to the controls & a ripple of dark energy spiralled outwards.
“To all Dalek fleets across time & space,” he announced with chilling grandeur, his voice echoing through the vortex. “Your queen is risen. The age of chaos begins. Prepare to conquer every dimension. There will be no resistance. Only obedience.”
The message travelled through stars & centuries. Dalek forces shuddered into formation, systems awakening from the depths of time. War engines hummed to life across dying galaxies but behind her vacant gaze, Rose Tyler was thinking.
She was feeling. A part of her screamed beneath the programming. Rage & sorrow churned like magma under ice. Every memory they tried to erase returned in brief, powerful fragments: the feel of her mum’s hand in hers, the sound of laughter echoing through the halls of Torchwood, John’s lips brushing her forehead, whispering he’d always protect her. She would obey for now but not for them. They had made her their queen but soon, they’d learn what kind of monarch she truly was.
Chapter 5: Chapter 5: Echoes Of Rose
Summary:
She may be gone but she isn’t lost.
***
Chapter Text
The hum of the TARDIS had always felt alive — like a heartbeat echoing through space & time but now, it throbbed with urgency, as if even the ship itself understood the weight of what was coming. The time rotor pulsed with an unsteady rhythm, glowing a deeper, more mournful blue, casting flickering shadows across the control room.
John stood alone at the console, fingertips ghosting over levers & dials, not really seeing them. His mind was elsewhere. Distant. Trapped in memories stitched too tightly into his bones to ever let go.
The Doctor — the real Doctor — watched him from the other side of the room, silent for once. There was no smugness. No witty retort perched on his tongue. Only a quiet understanding between two fractured versions of the same man.
John exhaled sharply, gripping the edge of the console as if the very act of standing upright cost him something.
“She named me,” he said suddenly, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Not ‘Doctor’—not him. Me. Just me.”
The Doctor tilted his head. “John.”
John nodded slowly, as though the name itself was sacred. “I remember the day. It was pouring. Pete’s World doesn’t rain often like that but she came in, soaked to the skin, all grin & freckles, holding two mugs of tea like it was nothing. She sat down, looked at me — properly, not like I was half of someone else — & said…”
His voice faltered. He closed his eyes, swallowed hard & forced the memory to the surface.
“‘I think you’re John,’” he murmured. “‘You’re not him anymore. You’re mine. You’re you. Don’t ever forget who you are.’”
There was a long pause.
“I never did,” John said at last, almost to himself. “Not for a second. Not even now.”
The TARDIS jolted gently. They had landed.
John stepped forward, spine straightening, jaw tight. Fire kindled behind his eyes again.
The Doctor moved beside him. “We’ll get her back,” he said simply.
John’s gaze flicked towards him, unspoken gratitude in his expression.
They opened the doors together.
Outside Torchwood
The skies over London were a bruised grey, low & pressing, promising rain but never delivering. The wind bit sharply as the TARDIS materialised outside the Torchwood compound — all steel walls & shielded turrets, its gates shuddering open the moment the time ship landed.
A welcoming party was already assembled.
Jack Harkness strode forward with his usual swagger, long coat whipping behind him but there was a steel in his eyes not dulled by charm.
“Well, look what the temporal tide washed in,” he said with a half-smile. “Two Doctors. What’s the universe come to?”
“Captain,” the Tenth Doctor greeted with a curt nod, brushing past the banter. “Where’s your team?”
“Inside & ready. We’ve got eyes across every rift point on the map, satellites tracking for quantum instability & UNIT’s standing by in orbit but this.” Jack glanced between the two of them, his voice dipping. “This is different, isn’t it?”
John stepped forward.
“They’ve got her,” he said quietly. “They turned her into something else.”
Jack’s expression changed. The joking fell away like ash in the wind.
“Rose?”
John nodded.
“The Daleks. The Master. She’s a hybrid now. She’s alive but not whole. They’ve weaponised her, made her their queen & she’s trapped in a base beneath the crust of a dying Earth. One we can barely reach.”
Jack’s jaw clenched.
“Then we dig.”
Behind him, the Torchwood Hub surged into motion. Alarms flared. Screens burst into life. Technicians scrambled, analysts shouted orders across consoles. The building became a living, breathing war machine , all focused on one mission. Rescue Rose Tyler.
John moved to the tactical holomap, sweat glistening on his brow. His fingers flew across the interface as he projected the coordinates extracted from the breach. The rift trembled in the corner of the screen, unstable, roiling with black vortex matter that shimmered like oil on water.
“She’s here,” John said, stabbing his finger at a flickering dot deep beneath the ruined surface of Prime Earth. “Encased in a bunker made from time-locked alloys. We’ll need a precision breach team, quantum drills & anti-Dalek field shields.”
Jack turned to his squad.
“You heard him. Arm up. Gear up. This is a one-way trip unless we do it right.”
Ricky & Jake stepped forward, both clad in reinforced exo-suits, their expressions carved from stone.
“She saved us,” Ricky said flatly. “We’re saving her.”
Jake nodded grimly.
“For Rose.”
The Doctor looked at them all, the soldiers, the rebels, the remnants of resistance & felt a flicker of something dangerous spark in his hearts. Hope. A different kind of war was coming & this time, they were going to take the fight to the Daleks.
***
Inside the cold, metal tomb of her hybrid prison, Rose lay motionless, a living statue carved of flesh & circuitry. Her glowing skin pulsed faintly with Dalek-blue veins of embedded tech, her lifeless eyes aimed blankly at the vaulted ceiling above but somewhere deeper, buried beneath the programming & synthetic obedience, a spark remained. Her mind. Fractured. Flickering but alive & within it chaos.
The void twisted like a black sea around her consciousness, hissing with static & alien noise but then came a sound, faint, delicate. A voice.
"Rose..."
The name floated gently, spoken with love, his voice. John’s. Soft as a whisper on the wind but thunderous against the silence.
“Come back to me.”
A pulse ran through her. Somewhere inside, she jerked. Not in her body that was still locked in obedience but her soul stirred. Her breath hitched. Her mind quivered like cracked glass, holding back a flood.
Suddenly: visions. Blurry. Fragmented. Drenched in shadow, as though half-remembered dreams stolen from someone else’s life.
Jackie sobbing, red-eyed, screaming her name on her knees in a golden-lit hallway.
Pete holding Tony in his arms, both of them watching the sky as one more star blinked out, swallowed by the void.
John , her John standing at the edge of a burning cliff, screaming across the breach, face contorted with pain.
"You’re stronger than this!" his voice echoed, distant, distorted. "Rose, don’t let them take you!"
She wanted to scream. Her mouth wouldn't move. Her hands, alien now, stayed locked in place.
The flicker of a memory jolted through her standing in the kitchen, laughing as John burnt the toast again. That time Tony spilled orange juice on her shoes. Her mum dancing to Bowie in her pyjamas. The Doctor grinning madly under the glow of a collapsing sun.
Each vision shuddered & twisted. Cracked apart. Rose gasped inside her mind. Then the stars began to go out. One by one. Black void swallowing them whole.
“No,” she tried to say, voice mute in the storm. Then she screamed in her mind, in the silence a soul-deep, aching cry that echoed & echoed until it broke into a million shattered pieces.
***
The Master appeared without ceremony, the hiss of pressurised doors slicing through the quiet like a blade. He stepped into the darkened chamber like a shadow given flesh, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction. He circled her slowly, hands clasped behind his back. The Hybrid Queen. His triumph.
“Sleeping beauty’s stirring,” he cooed mockingly, crouching before her, eye-level. “Did you enjoy your little dream, Rose? All those sweet, syrupy memories trying to pull you back?”
Her expression was blank. Her Dalek-blue eyes stared straight ahead but he saw it the faintest twitch. A betrayal in the corner of her lip. A flicker of thought beneath the programming. “You heard him, didn’t you? John. Oh, he’s persistent. So tragically in love. It’s pathetic, really.” He rose to his feet & paced slowly, boots echoing against metal. “But let me tell you something, my dear.” His voice dropped, venomous & low. “He left you. He always leaves you. First the Doctor, then your John. All the same. Timelords. Half-Timelords. Rubbish at goodbyes, brilliant at betrayal.” He leaned close, his mouth near her ear. “I didn’t leave,” he whispered. “I found you. I gave you purpose.” With a snap of his fingers, a screen shimmered to life, artificial memories. False visions. The Doctor turning away from her. John walking through a door & never coming back. Torchwood burning. Jackie screaming as Pete pulled her from the wreckage. Lies. Twisted truths stitched together into poison. The Master reached out & stroked the eyestalk protruding from her forehead like a grotesque crown. “He never deserved you but I see what you are. What you can become.” Her lips parted. Voice hollow.
“I obey.” The Master’s smile widened, shark-like. The Daleks echoed from above their mechanical tones reverberating like a chorus from hell:
“The Hybrid Queen shall lead. Obey. Conquer. Dominate.” But deep inside, beneath the mechanical tyranny, something stirred. Not a flicker this time but a flame. Controlled. Hidden. She obeyed for now but inside, Rose was plotting & one day soon, the Hybrid Queen would burn the Daleks from the inside out.
Chapter 6: Chapter 6: Return To The Stars
Summary:
The fight to reclaim Rose begins.
***
Chapter Text
The rift tore open with a sound like the universe gasping. A flash of raw light cracked across the atmosphere before folding in on itself & from the wreckage of space stepped five shadows — cloaked in silence, armed with fury & driven by something deeper than vengeance.
Hope.
The Doctor crouched first, sonic screwdriver already out & scanning, eyes darting beneath his furrowed brow. John landed beside him with far less grace, breath sharp in his chest, sweat already misting his brow despite the chill that slithered through the metal corridors.
Behind them, Ricky & Jake dropped into cover, their UNIT-grade rifles primed but held close to their chests. Jack brought up the rear, long coat billowing behind him like a war banner, twin pistols holstered, eyes sharp.
The Dalek Fortress rose above them — not built but grown from corrupted time-energy & void matter, jagged like a wound carved into the crust of this dying Earth. The air thrummed with unnatural vibrations, like the walls themselves were breathing. Every surface shimmered with alien tech — dark panels laced with pulsating gold veins, symbols etched in Gallifreyan twisted through Dalek geometry.
“Bloody hell,” Jake muttered under his breath, his voice barely a whisper. “Looks like something out of a nightmare.”
“It is,” John said grimly, stepping forward, eyes locked ahead. “& she’s in the heart of it.”
The corridor before them stretched endlessly, illuminated by an eerie amber glow emanating from the walls. Strange tendrils of energy spiralled in & out of the stone, reacting to their presence. The air was sharp with the tang of ozone & every breath tasted like static.
“We’ll only get one shot,” the Doctor murmured. “Cloaking’s already destabilising. If the Daleks get a scent of us—”
“We’re dead,” Jack finished for him, unholstering his weapon. “So let’s not dawdle.”
The first trap came seconds later.
A motion-sensitive laser grid dropped from the ceiling without warning, slicing the air with ultraviolet fire. Ricky threw himself back, only just avoiding the searing beam that scorched a black line through the floor where his leg had been.
“Trap sensors embedded in the floor plates,” the Doctor snapped, waving the sonic across the panel. “Too sensitive for stealth fields.”
John leapt forward, fingers flying across a jagged interface, overriding the security with an almost primal urgency. His voice was breathless but controlled.
“I’ve got it. Dalek tech—part Time Lord corrupted. I can read it. Just don’t breathe too loud.”
The grid dissipated & they moved.
They passed through dark sanctums, each more grotesque than the last — holding chambers filled with discarded hybrid attempts, broken shells with half-formed bodies & blinking red lights where eyes should have been. The stench of oil & scorched flesh clung to the air like smoke.
Jack’s voice, low & rough: “They’ve been experimenting for years. This wasn’t just about Rose. She was the final phase.”
The Doctor didn’t answer.
Because he knew.
As they entered a vaulted nexus chamber, the walls around them rippled — alive with Dalek energy. A faint, rhythmic pulse beat beneath their feet, like the fortress had a heart.
“We’re close,” John said, voice hollow. “I can feel her. She’s somewhere near the central core.” A piercing screech suddenly echoed through the corridor, metallic, high-pitched.
“INTRUDERS DETECTED. LOCATION: SECTOR NINE. EXTERMINATE. EXTERMINATE.” Red lights flared. Sirens wailed. The fortress stirred.
“No time for subtlety,” Jack growled. “We fight our way in.” From the shadows, the first wave came, Daleks, gliding with cold precision, energy weapons charging. The air burned with the rising hum of impending destruction. The Doctor turned to the others.
“No killing if we can avoid it” But John was already running. Straight into the chaos.
“For her!”
Blaster fire lit up the darkness like a storm. Screams of “EXTERMINATE!” mingled with the furious battle cries of men determined not to lose again. Above it all, buried in the metal & shadows, Rose watched through hidden cameras. Unmoving. Expression blank but her heart that stubborn, half-human heart beat harder. He came. They were coming for her & the Hybrid Queen began to smile.
***
The inner sanctum of the Dalek stronghold felt like stepping into a cathedral built by the damned. Black stone walls veined with molten circuitry pulsed with a slow, rhythmic beat — an imitation of a heart but colder, corrupted. The room reeked of ozone, oil & something more metallic, almost coppery blood but not quite. Alien. Wrong & in the centre of it all, standing on a raised obsidian dais lit by an eerie glow, was her. Rose or what remained of her.
John stumbled to a halt as the others fanned out cautiously behind him but he could barely breathe, let alone speak. The image before him wrenched every fragment of his soul apart.
She was draped in a long, form-fitting coat of midnight black, fused with armour-like ridges of Dalek plating that curled around one shoulder & half her ribcage like some grotesque second skin. Dark, circuit-like etchings glowed faintly along her arms & throat, beneath the skin, embedded into her very flesh. Her left eye shone eerily gold, mechanical, while from her forehead, a delicate but horrific Dalek eyestalk emerged like a twisted crown & in her right palm, sleek & seamless, the metallic muzzle of a Dalek gunstick clicked softly into place as she turned. Her golden hair had been woven into intricate, almost regal braids, wrapped with filament wires that pulsed faint blue. Her lips were pale. Her eyes soulless. Cold. Empty. She was their Queen.
“Rose” John choked her name like it was all he had left to say, a plea, a prayer, a memory. The Hybrid Queen stared down at him in silence. Her head tilted, slow, robotic. Then, with an eerie whirring sound, her gunstick extended, now fully charged trained on him.
“Don’t advance,” she said flatly, voice monotone, mechanised, yet unmistakably hers. “You aren’t authorised. I will exterminate.” John took one step forward anyway, his breath catching.
“I’m not here to hurt you, Rose. I” his voice broke. “I’ve come to bring you home.” Her hand trembled. Slightly. Barely but he saw it. Something, deep behind those mechanical eyes, flickered. A shadow of something once human. Once his. A crack in the programming. She blinked. Once. Hard.
“Home,” she repeated, the word fractured on her tongue, like it tasted unfamiliar. Her pupils dilated slightly as if her mind were searching for meaning. Behind her, the circuitry on her spine pulsed irregularly.
“You gave me my name, remember?” John whispered, stepping closer now. “John. You made me promise I’d never forget who I was. Well, I didn’t & I never forgot you either.” Silence stretched. Then her jaw clenched. The gunstick crackled with blue fire. “Rose!” he shouted, voice cracking with desperation. “You’re stronger than this! Fight it! You are not their puppet!” The words hit something. She staggered back a step, brows twitching as if the internal programming jolted with static. Her head jerked. Her breath came out ragged almost human. Confusion twisted across her features. John stepped forward again. This time, she didn’t raise the weapon. “Come back to me,” he whispered, softer now, aching. “Please.” & then she vanished. In a blaze of golden light, a transmat field sparked around her feet & she was gone. “NO!” John screamed, running to where she had stood, breath coming in ragged gasps. He dropped to his knees, hands slamming the cold floor. “No no no no, Rose!” Silence. Only the low, pulsing hum of the fortress remained & the emptiness where she had once been. Jack moved in quietly behind him, placing a steadying hand on his shoulder.
“She hesitated,” Jack murmured. “That means she’s still in there.”
John didn’t respond. He could barely breathe because he’d seen it too. That moment. That flicker. The ghost of her humanity struggling to surface beneath the mechanical veneer. She was still fighting & he would tear through time & space itself before he let her lose.
Chapter 7: Chapter 7: The Storm Within
Summary:
A mind divided. A love unbroken.
***
Chapter Text
The transmat pulse slammed into her like a violent explosion, hurling Rose across space & time with a brutal force that stole the breath from her lungs. She crashed hard against the obsidian floor, pain searing through her limbs as every nerve flared in sharp protest. The crushing weight of the chamber’s oppressive atmosphere wrapped around her like a suffocating noose, squeezing her will to resist.
Around her, the throne room stretched vast & cavernous, its black walls slick & glistening like wet stone, etched with cruel crimson Dalek runes that pulsed rhythmically — a heartbeat of malevolence. The very air was thick & choking, saturated with the sharp metallic sting of burning circuits & rusted steel that clawed at her lungs, stealing precious breaths even as her mind screamed in defiant silence.
Her gaze dropped to the mirror-smooth floor, where a fractured nightmare stared back at her. One eye warm & human, flickering with raw emotion; the other a cold, unblinking golden cybernetic orb that seemed to pierce through her very soul. Jagged veins of glowing circuitry traced twisted, unnatural patterns beneath her pale, translucent skin — an eerie fusion of flesh & machine. The mechanical eyestalk embedded in her forehead twitched spasmodically, a cruel sentinel attuned to the relentless flood of commands that invaded her mind.
Inside her skull, the Dalek programming surged like a cold, merciless tide, drowning her thoughts in ruthless orders.
Submit. Obey. Destroy.
The words hammered against her fragile resistance like iron mallets, threatening to crush the last flicker of Rose Tyler’s humanity. Her breath caught, shallow & ragged, as the insidious voice echoed relentlessly, erasing hope, memories & love.
But deep within, beneath the choking darkness, a spark still burned.
With trembling heartbeat, she clawed at the invasive code, wrestling for control of her mind & body. Desperate, she grasped at fragments of her former self — the softness of John’s voice, laughter shared in Pete’s World, the warm touch of human connection — clutching these memories like lifelines in the storm.
“You are the Hybrid Queen,” hissed the Dalek voice, venomous & cold. “You will rule. You will annihilate.”
Her lips parted, voice hollow & monotone, betraying none of the tempest raging inside.
“I obey.” Bitter, alien words spilled forth, a fragile mask shielding the roaring rebellion beneath but the darker, mechanical side grew stronger, relentless & insidious. The cold, logical cruelty of the Daleks seeped ever deeper, poisoning her thoughts & clawing towards dominance. Her mechanical eye flared fiercely, circuits beneath her translucent skin sparking & twitching with agonised rebellion. A single, shimmering tear, half human, half circuitry, traced a slow, reluctant path down her cheek. “I am Rose Tyler,” she whispered, voice cracked & raw, defiant & fragile, “& I will not be lost.” Her gaze snapped upward to the throne before her — a brutal monolith of black steel, scarred & worn by countless conquests, pulsing with a malignant heartbeat, feeding on her turmoil. It whispered promises of terrible power, offered dominion at the price of her very soul. Her body trembled violently under the strain of the war raging inside — flesh & machine locked in savage combat, mind torn between despair & fierce hope.
Then, summoning every ounce of her wilting strength, she raised her gunstick—cold, deadly metal fused to her palm—firing a searing blast into the throne room’s obsidian wall.
The beam tore through the stone with a deafening crack, shattering the silence as shards & sparks exploded outward, dust swirling in the crimson glow. A gaping hole yawned open, jagged & raw — a wound in the impenetrable fortress, a passage to freedom.
Her breath came ragged & fast, heart hammering in her chest as she tasted the intoxicating bite of rebellion. The Dalek programming snarled in fury, desperate to regain control but Rose’s fragile, flickering flame blazed fiercely against the consuming darkness.
The Hybrid Queen was rising but within her, the human Rose Tyler fought desperately to survive & she would not surrender.
***
John stood alone before the swirling, pulsating Gallifreyan device, an ancient artefact of glowing, iridescent rings & delicate filaments humming with raw, temporal energy. Its light spilled across the sterile chamber like liquid starlight, cold yet alive, whispering promises & dangers in equal measure. His fingers trembled slightly as he activated the intricate controls, eyes blazing with desperate hope.
With a sudden pulse, the world around him dissolved.
He found himself standing in a place impossible & surreal a fractured mental landscape born from the chaos of Rose’s fractured mind. To one side, towering monoliths of cold Dalek steel rose under a storm-smeared sky, their surfaces etched with sinister, glowing runes. Mechanical drones flitted through the heavy air, their harsh, grinding hums blending with distant screams & the endless clatter of merciless machinery but then, as if torn between 2 realities, the landscape abruptly shifted. Golden sunlight bathed a serene, windswept beach where gentle waves caressed the shore & wildflowers swayed softly in a warm breeze scented with salt & earth. The horizon stretched endless, a fragile shard of Rose’s lost humanity struggling to survive.
John’s heart clenched painfully as he stepped forward, his breath catching. This was her, trapped, torn between worlds.
“Rose,” he whispered, voice thick with raw emotion, stepping toward the shimmering divide between steel & sand. “Please remember.” A chorus of Dalek voices shattered the fragile calm, shrill, merciless commands echoing from the steel towers, clawing at her mind with merciless insistence. Submit. Obey. Resist is death. John’s voice rose above the chaos, steady & pleading. “Fight it, Rose. You’re stronger than this. You’re not just the Hybrid Queen. You’re Rose Tyler. You’re alive. Remember me. Remember who you are.” She appeared then a flickering figure caught between the two worlds. Her eyes darted wildly, one glowing gold, the other shimmering with human warmth but shadowed by torment. She clutched her temples, trembling violently as if the voices clawed beneath her skin, tearing at her soul.
“Turn it off!” she gasped, voice cracking. “Make it stop!” John stepped closer, desperation bleeding through his calm exterior.
“I’m here. I won’t let go. Remember Pete’s World, the laughter, the love. Remember us.” Her breath hitched; a tear glimmered on the edge of her mechanical cheek. For a brief, shattering moment, the Dalek drones faltered, their sinister chorus losing strength against the warmth of his words but the battle was far from won. Rose’s body trembled, torn between steel & flesh. The relentless Dalek programming screaming for submission & a flickering ember of humanity fighting fiercely to survive. John reached out, voice a lifeline. “Come back to me, Rose. Fight. Please.” & somewhere deep inside, buried beneath circuits & shadows, the flicker of hope dared to burn.
***
A chilling wind swept through the fractured mindscape, carrying with it an oppressive weight that seemed to suffocate the fragile hopes lingering within Rose. Shadows writhed & twisted, coalescing into a familiar, sinister shape, The Master.
He emerged like a predator from the darkness, his cold eyes gleaming with cruel intent, every step echoing like a death knell in the vast, broken expanse of her fractured psyche. His presence rippled through the landscape, twisting the golden sunlight into a sickly, bruised twilight, the comforting sands of her humanity corroding into jagged obsidian shards beneath her feet.
“Rose,” he whispered, voice silk wrapped in venom, crawling under her skin like poison. “You belong with me. This fragile light, this pathetic flicker of resistance. It will burn out.”
He reached for her mind with ruthless precision, dragging her away from the fragile shore & deeper into the harsh, merciless Dalek realm. The steel towers pulsed with a malevolent glow, their cruel runes burning brighter as the Master pulled her closer, the air thickening with the acrid stench of machine oil & scorched circuits. Rose stumbled, heart shattering as the duality within her wrenched her apart. The cold, unyielding Dalek programming clawed at her will, while the whispered memories of John, of laughter & love, fought desperately to cling on. Her legs gave way beneath the crushing pressure & she collapsed into the chasm between flesh & machine. Tears, a startling, fragile sign of life, traced a slow path down her cheek, glistening like a single beacon of hope amid the encroaching darkness. The Master’s smile was merciless, eyes glittering with triumph. “Give in, Rose. Let go. Become the Hybrid Queen fully. Embrace the power. Reject the weakness.” But even as his words wrapped around her like chains, a fierce, flickering defiance ignited deep within. The tear falling from her eye was more than sorrow. It was a promise. A vow that somewhere inside, Rose Tyler still fought. Still remembered. Torn, broken but unbowed. The mindscape trembled, a battleground poised on the edge of oblivion.
Chapter 8: Chapter 8: Break The Chain
Summary:
To save her, someone must let go of their guilt.
***
Chapter Text
Rose’s breath hitched sharply as the shadows of the mindscape closed in around her, cold & unyielding like the grip of iron chains tightening around her soul. The Master’s presence was a suffocating storm — relentless, consuming, pressing down with the weight of inevitability.
His voice slithered through the darkness, honeyed & cruel. “You cannot fight what you are, Rose. You were never meant to be whole again. The Daleks crafted you into their masterpiece — a Hybrid Queen destined to command, to conquer, to destroy.”
Rose’s human eye flickered with defiance but her cybernetic orb betrayed the battle raging beneath. The cold logic programmed into her veins whispered in icy tones, whispering promises of power, control & purpose. The Master’s words were venom but also a strange, magnetic pull — darkly intoxicating.
“Look at yourself,” he urged, his voice dropping low, almost tender but laced with menace. “Half human, half machine — torn between two worlds but the machine must dominate. It’s inevitable. Resistance is futile & it only brings pain. I offer release, Rose. Control. Freedom from that weak, fleeting humanity.”
Her breath hitched, a shudder rippling through her limbs. The mental chains tightened as she felt the edges of her fractured identity blur — the memories of laughter & love fading beneath the cold tide of programming. The struggle to hold onto herself was weakening.
“But I…” Rose’s voice cracked, fragile & raw, “I still remember John. I remember who I was…”
The Master smiled, cruel & triumphant. “John? The Metacrisis Doctor? Your precious tether to the past? He is powerless to save you now. You belong to me, Rose & I will not lose what I have claimed.”
He reached toward her, fingers twisting the very fabric of her mind, dragging her closer into the depths of Dalek dominance. “Submit to me. Accept what you have become. The Hybrid Queen, the ultimate weapon. Together, we will shatter the universe’s fragile order & remake it in our image.”
Rose’s lips trembled as conflicting emotions warred inside her — the warmth of humanity battling the cold, seductive promise of power. Slowly, inexorably, the dark side’s whisper grew louder, drowning out the flickering light of resistance.
“I obey…” The words slipped out in a hollow monotone, alien on her tongue but strangely comforting.
The Master’s eyes gleamed with victorious fire. “Yes, that’s it. Embrace the darkness. Your strength lies not in defiance but in obedience. In unity with the Dalek will, you will become unstoppable.”
A tear slid down Rose’s cheek, a fragile trace of the woman she once was, battling beneath the surface. “But… I’m still here. Somewhere.”
The Master laughed softly, low & cruel. “You are here, Rose — a puppet on a string & soon, the strings will snap only when I command it.”
He leaned closer, voice a dark caress. “Surrender to me fully & I will grant you power beyond your wildest dreams. Fight & you will only break.”
Rose’s breath caught, her body trembling as the final threads of resistance strained against the overwhelming tide.
The battle within her was far from over — but the Master’s grasp was tightening. The Hybrid Queen was awakening & her heart was slowly slipping from the fragile cage of humanity into the cold dominion of darkness.
***
The cramped living room in Pete’s World was heavy with silence — thick & suffocating, like the weight of a storm about to break. Dust motes hung in the golden afternoon light, drifting lazily through the narrow window while the old tape recorder sat on the worn wooden table, its red recording light glowing like a tiny beacon of hope & despair.
Jackie’s hands trembled as she clasped the small microphone, her voice catching in her throat before she found the strength to speak. “Rose, love... if you’re hearing this, it means things have gone terribly wrong but know this — no matter what they do to you, you’re not alone. Not ever. You’re our daughter, our heart.. & we’ll never stop fighting for you.”
Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, the raw ache of a mother’s love bleeding through every word, every fragile breath.
Tony, perched on the edge of the sofa, fiddled nervously with his favourite toy car. When it was his turn, his voice was small, innocent & trembling with a child’s simple hope.
“Rosie... I miss you lots. I hope you’re okay & that you’re not scared. I’m saving my biggest hug for when you come home, okay? & I made you a picture with loads of stars & smileys so you don’t forget me.”
Pete adjusted the microphone with a shaky hand, his face shadowed but resolute. He swallowed hard before speaking, voice low & steady, carrying the weight of unspoken fears. “Rose... if you’re out there, if you can hear us — you’re more than what they’ve made you. You’re a fighter. You’re family. We don’t know what’s waiting for you but you’ve got to believe there’s a way back & when you find it... we’ll be here. Waiting.”
The recorder clicked off, leaving a hollow echo in the stillness. The three of them sat in silence, hearts pounding with hope & dread, praying their voices might reach across the void , a lifeline thrown through the dark, desperate to tether Rose back to them.
Outside, the wind stirred softly through the trees, carrying with it the faintest whisper of a promise, that even in the darkest places, love might still find a way.
***
The oppressive atmosphere of the alien world thickened, swirling around them like a suffocating shroud. Jagged shadows stretched from the towering obsidian throne where Rose sat, half woman, half Dalek nightmare. Her form was an unsettling marriage of flesh & cold machine, clad in a patchwork of torn fabric & gleaming cybernetic plating that seemed to breathe with sinister life. Beneath her pale, translucent skin, circuitry pulsed erratically, a fractured heartbeat caught between two worlds.
Her human eye was glazed, distant, holding a fragile flicker of the woman John once knew but dominating her forehead, the Dalek eyestalk blazed a fierce, electric blue, scanning their surroundings with deadly precision. It twitched like a predator’s gaze, cold & unyielding. The gunstick embedded in her palm hummed softly, a lethal promise held in perfect readiness, primed to fire at a moment’s notice.
John’s heart thundered in his chest, muscles coiled tight as he stepped forward, voice raw with desperation.
“Rose. it’s me. John.” Her mechanical weapon wavered for a fleeting second, the eyestalk’s light flickering uncertainly. A tremor of hesitation crossed her fractured features, a silent plea buried beneath layers of ruthless programming. Then the gunstick surged upward, the hum growing sharp & menacing but John didn’t flinch. Instead, he stretched out trembling hands, voice breaking through the storm of circuits & steel. “Don’t let them win. Don’t let them take you from me.”
A crackling surge rippled through her cybernetic eye as the battle within her raged, cold logic clawing to dominate, yet a stubborn ember of humanity fighting to ignite. Suddenly, beside John, a quiet hum filled the air. The Doctor materialised, stepping through the swirling mist like a beacon of hope, clutching a small, glowing Gallifreyan device etched with ancient runes.
“This is it,” the Doctor murmured, eyes fierce. “One last chance—no half measures this time. I’m taking you back inside her mind, John. We’re going all in.” John nodded, swallowing the lump in his throat. The device pulsed warmly in his palm, a gateway to the deepest recesses of Rose’s fractured consciousness, a place where the war for her soul was fought in silence & shadow. Together, they activated the device. Reality around them shimmered & blurred & suddenly John felt himself plunging, falling deep into the twisting labyrinth of Rose’s mindscape. The walls of her inner world crackled with Dalek code, dark tendrils reaching for him as the device steadied his form against the tidal wave of invasive programming. This was no longer just a rescue mission. It was a full assault on the fortress of her mind, a final stand to wrest back the woman Rose once was, from the cold, merciless grasp of the Hybrid Queen. The Doctor’s voice echoed softly in the darkness: “Hold on tight, John. We’re coming for her. Together.”
***
The oppressive atmosphere of the alien world thickened, swirling around them like a suffocating shroud. Jagged shadows stretched from the towering obsidian throne where Rose sat—half woman, half Dalek nightmare. Her form was an unsettling marriage of flesh & cold machine, clad in a patchwork of torn fabric & gleaming cybernetic plating that seemed to breathe with sinister life. Beneath her pale, translucent skin, circuitry pulsed erratically, a fractured heartbeat caught between two worlds.
Her human eye was glazed, distant, holding a fragile flicker of the woman John once knew but dominating her forehead, the Dalek eyestalk blazed a fierce, electric blue, scanning their surroundings with deadly precision. It twitched like a predator’s gaze, cold & unyielding. The gunstick embedded in her palm hummed softly, a lethal promise held in perfect readiness, primed to fire at a moment’s notice.
John’s heart thundered in his chest, muscles coiled tight as he stepped forward, voice raw with desperation. “Rose... it’s me. John.”
Her mechanical weapon wavered for a fleeting second, the eyestalk’s light flickering uncertainly. A tremor of hesitation crossed her fractured features—a silent plea buried beneath layers of ruthless programming.
Then the gunstick surged upward, the hum growing sharp & menacing but John didn’t flinch. Instead, he stretched out trembling hands, voice breaking through the storm of circuits & steel.
“Don’t let them win. Don’t let them take you from me.”
A crackling surge rippled through her cybernetic eye as the battle within her raged—cold logic clawing to dominate, yet a stubborn ember of humanity fighting to ignite.
Suddenly, beside John, a quiet hum filled the air. The Doctor materialised, stepping through the swirling mist like a beacon of hope, clutching a small, glowing Gallifreyan device etched with ancient runes.
“This is it,” the Doctor murmured, eyes fierce. “One last chance—no half measures this time. I’m taking you back inside her mind, John. We’re going all in.”
John nodded, swallowing the lump in his throat. The device pulsed warmly in his palm, a gateway to the deepest recesses of Rose’s fractured consciousness—a place where the war for her soul was fought in silence & shadow.
Together, they activated the device. Reality around them shimmered & blurred & suddenly John felt himself plunging—falling deep into the twisting labyrinth of Rose’s mindscape. The walls of her inner world crackled with Dalek code, dark tendrils reaching for him as the device steadied his form against the tidal wave of invasive programming.
This was no longer just a rescue mission. It was a full assault on the fortress of her mind, a final stand to wrest back the woman Rose once was, from the cold, merciless grasp of the Hybrid Queen.
The Doctor’s voice echoed softly in the darkness: “Hold on tight, John. We’re coming for her. Together.”
The mental landscape rippled like a surreal dreamscape—a vast, endless beach beneath a bruised, storm-swollen sky. Waves crashed rhythmically against the shore, their thunderous roar mingling with the haunting whisper of the wind. Sand stretched cold & endless beneath John’s feet, grains shifting unnaturally like scattered memories, slipping through his fingers.
His breath caught as he scanned the horizon, searching for the fragile flicker of light he knew was still there—buried beneath the Dalek steel & circuitry, hidden inside Rose’s shattered mind.
There, just beyond the mist, a figure emerged—pale & trembling, clad in torn fragments of her half-human, half-Dalek skin. Her hair clung damp & wild around her face, eyes wide but glassy, reflecting the tempest of her internal battle.
“Rose,” John called out, his voice barely more than a whisper, thick with desperation & hope. “Please, come back to me.”
The figure’s gaze flickered, a soft crack in the cold armour. Her lips parted, voice fragile but unmistakably hers, breath catching in the salt-tinged air. “...John?”
Relief flooded him, fierce & raw. He closed the distance with urgent steps, heart pounding as he reached out, his hand trembling as it sought hers. Fingers brushed—tentative, hesitant—then locked together, warm & real.
“Come back to me, Rose,” he pleaded, voice breaking beneath the weight of all they’d lost. “You’re still in there. Fight it. Fight for us.”
Her breath hitched, eyes shimmering with tears that glistened like fragile pearls against the wild backdrop of sand & sea. The storm above seemed to pause, as if holding its breath, while the fragile spark of her true self flickered fiercely in that moment of connection.
“I’m here,” she whispered, voice raw but growing stronger. “I’m still here... John.”
For a heartbeat, time itself seemed to still—two souls reunited against impossible odds, standing on the edge of darkness with hope shining like a beacon between them.
Chapter 9: Chapter 9: The Fall Of The Master
Summary:
The tide turns but not without cost.
***
Chapter Text
The sky above them trembled — dark clouds cracking with veins of sickly gold lightning, the mindscape beginning to shudder under the strain of Rose’s flickering resistance. The moment she said his name, the beach shifted — like the landscape itself recoiled from her defiance. The wind howled, harsher now, filled with static & screams that didn’t belong to any living thing.
Rose’s fingers tightened around John’s. She winced, clenching her eyes shut as pain lanced through her skull. Her eyestalk — though absent in this dreamlike realm — pulsed in her mind’s eye, glowing brighter with each second. The Dalek voice returned, louder, angrier, more insistent.
Obey. Obey. OBEY.
Rose dropped to her knees with a cry, clutching her head. “No—no! Get out of my mind! I won’t go back!”
John knelt beside her, wrapping his arms around her trembling form. “You’re stronger than this, Rose. You’re fighting. That means it hasn’t won. You haven’t lost.”
But the beach began to crack.
Fissures tore through the sand, black voids gaping open beneath their feet, swallowing colour, hope & memory. A shadow rose from the surf, slow & terrible — a figure in a long, dark coat with eyes like burning coals.
The Master.
He stepped forward, dripping from the storm like it had birthed him, a knowing, venomous smirk playing on his lips. “How touching,” he purred, voice soaked in mockery. “A reunion amidst the wreckage but it’s far too late for sentiment, Metacrisis. She’s already mine.”
Rose’s body went rigid as the Master raised a hand. Dark tendrils burst from his fingers — shadowy code, alive & writhing — & plunged straight into her chest. She screamed, the sound ripping through the sky.
John threw himself in front of her, teeth gritted, trying to shield her but the darkness surged through him too — a parasitic force trying to tear his essence apart. Still, he held on.
“Rose—look at me,” John gasped, his forehead pressed against hers, sweat & tears mingling. “You chose your name. You chose your life. Don’t let him take that from you.”
She blinked at him, dazed, trembling. Her lips moved, voice barely audible.
“Tell me who I am.”
“You’re Rose Tyler,” he whispered fiercely. “From the Powell Estate. Defender of the Earth. Braver than anyone I’ve ever known.”
The eyestalk in her memory flickered blue but it didn’t power up — it dimmed.
The Master snarled, stepping forward. “NO. You are the Hybrid Queen. My Queen. Your flesh is already fused with the code of every Dalek fleet across the timeline. You belong to me now!”
Rose’s breath came in hard gasps. Her mind was a battlefield — love against logic, fire against frost. She could feel the Dalek systems stirring inside her again, rage rising like bile. Her voice cracked.
“I can feel her… the other me. She wants to give in.”
“Then let her,” the Master hissed, eyes gleaming with mad triumph. “You’ll never have to feel pain again. No more fear, no more doubt. Only purpose. Only power.”
But Rose suddenly gritted her teeth, face twisted in effort. “& no more love, right?”
She stood, shaking violently, the air around her shimmering with heat & static. Her skin glowed — circuitry beneath the surface sparking erratically, caught in an internal war.
“Then I’d rather burn.”
& she screamed — a raw, feral sound that shattered the sky. A wave of energy burst from her chest, light slamming outward in every direction, obliterating the tendrils of the Master’s darkness. The beach cracked wide open beneath him & the Master stumbled backward, eyes wide, as a rift began to form behind him — unstable, roaring with time energy.
Rose collapsed into John’s arms, panting, still glowing faintly. “Get me out,” she whispered. “Before it takes me again.”
John clutched her to him, holding her like she was the universe itself. “I’ve got you. I’m not letting go.”
Far off, in the waking world, the Gallifreyan device began to pulse faster. The Doctor’s voice rang out:
“Now! Pull them back!”
The storm consumed the mindscape as light & time fractured.
& just before it all vanished—Rose looked at John & for the first time in too long, her real eye was clear.
***
The throne room groaned with unearthly energy — a mechanical heartbeat pounding like war drums through its vast, vaulted chamber. Crimson light flared from the walls, pulsing in rhythm with the shriek of Dalek machinery. The air burned, thick with the stench of scorched metal & ozone, vibrating with the high-pitched whine of power running wild.
Rose stood in the centre of it all — no longer a prisoner on her knees but a trembling figure poised on the edge of defiance. Her body crackled with unstable energy, Dalek circuitry spasming beneath her skin as the internal systems shrieked in protest.
Her breath was ragged, her mind split between two worlds — the cold, mechanical rhythm of Dalek control & the fierce, blistering fire of her human soul reawakening.
“System override,” a voice crackled from within her. Dalek protocol. Her muscles spasmed involuntarily. “Hybrid Queen: return to compliance.”
But Rose’s lips curled into a snarl.
“No.”
With a guttural cry, she reached up with trembling hands — fingers digging into the burning flesh of her forehead where the eyestalk pulsed, twitching violently. Sparks exploded across her vision, the nerve endings screaming as she grasped the twisted base of the implant.
It fought back — twitching, resisting, howling through her mind.
But she was stronger.
With one brutal, agonised pull, she tore the eyestalk from her head.
The scream that followed wasn’t just hers. The Dalek systems shrieked in collective agony, a thousand cold voices screeching in unison. Her body convulsed as arcs of blue lightning danced across her skin, the control matrix splintering.
Her knees buckled but she didn’t fall.
She staggered forward, breath coming in painful bursts, eyes locked onto the towering, pulsating structure at the heart of the chamber — the Conversion Core. It pulsed like a dark sun, molten with cruel potential. It was the nexus — the womb of her creation & it had to die.
Lifting her arm, Rose locked her trembling gaze onto the core. The gunstick embedded in her palm primed with a screech, glowing fiercely, power building with each beat of her furious heart.
“Goodbye,” she whispered hoarsely, “to what you made me.”
She fired.
The blast tore through the room with a deafening boom, a white-hot bolt of energy slamming directly into the core. The impact sent shockwaves through the floor, throwing debris & molten shards into the air. A rupture opened across the chamber wall, bleeding smoke & flame.
The core convulsed, lights flashing wildly, machinery wailing in torment as the entire fortress shook with the force of internal destruction. Rose stood amidst the chaos, blood trailing from her temple, chest heaving, fire roaring behind her & for the first time in what felt like forever, she felt like herself.
***
The fortress was burning.
Crimson emergency lights flashed in manic rhythm, casting jagged shadows along the metal walls. Flames licked up the central pylons, eating through blackened steel as alarms howled like tortured spirits. The walls trembled violently — shuddering under the weight of collapsing systems & ruptured energy cores. It was the end of a kingdom forged in cruelty & at its heart, the monsters who had ruled it faced their reckoning.
In the throne chamber, where once Dalek order had reigned supreme, the final battle was reaching its crescendo.
John stood firm, battered & bloodied, clothes torn & streaked with soot. At his side, the Doctor — coat singed, eyes wild with fury & heartbreak — faced the man who had orchestrated it all.
The Master.
He stood tall & cracked with madness, his coat whipping around him as the wind from ruptured systems howled through the broken room. The smouldering wreckage behind him cast an orange glow across his face — a picture of chaos made flesh & there, between them, was Rose.
She stood barely upright, body trembling with the aftershocks of rebellion. Smoke curled from her palm where the gunstick had once lived. Her brow was torn where she had ripped out the eyestalk, blood streaking down her cheek. She was radiant in her fury, terrifying in her defiance.
“My queen,” the Master hissed, voice sharp & brittle. “Look what you’ve done. Everything I created, everything we could have ruled. You were meant to bring the Daleks to heel, to reign beside me through fire & time. We were perfect together!”
Rose’s lip curled in disgust. Her voice was low, cracked but venomous.
“I was never yours.”
The Master snarled, lunging forward but John was faster. He threw himself at him with a fury that had been building for years. The two men collided like colliding storms, fists meeting flesh in savage rhythm. The Doctor joined seconds later, wrenching the Master back with a vicious blow that sent him sprawling into the wreckage.
“You twisted her into a weapon,” the Doctor spat, standing over him. “You filled her with hate & she still chose us. She chose love.”
The Master coughed, blood painting his teeth.
“& she’ll die for it.”
A violent tremor cracked through the floor. Sparks rained from the ceiling. Behind them, the Conversion Core, now exposed & melting, roared like an angry god. Systems failed one by one. The walls screamed.
John staggered to Rose’s side. Her knees buckled. He caught her just before she collapsed, cradling her in his arms as debris tumbled from above.
“Rose!” he choked, pulling her tight to his chest. “Stay with me. Please stay.”
Her breath was shallow, eyelids fluttering. Her body, overclocked, overrun, human systems scorched by Dalek tech, was shutting down.
“Too much…” she whispered. “I burned it out. It hurts.”
“No, no, no, no. we’re getting you out. We’ve got to get you out.”
The Doctor ran to them, voice sharp.
“The transmat relay’s destabilised. If we don’t go now”
An explosion tore through the corridor behind them, metal shrieking like an animal. The entire far wall of the chamber imploded inwards, fire erupting behind it.
The Master stood at the centre of the inferno, half-shielded by rubble, watching them with wide, broken eyes.
“She was mine...”
The ceiling cracked. A final rupture split the chamber & the floor beneath the Master gave way. He didn’t scream. The darkness took him, swallowed whole by the monstrous machine he had built & lost control of. His creation. His grave.
The Doctor slammed his hand onto the transmat control.
“Hold on to her!”
Blinding light engulfed them.
A split-second later, they landed hard on scorched grass under a twilight sky. The remains of the fortress blazed behind them on the horizon, casting a dull glow into the cold air. John held Rose tightly, his knees soaked in mud, cradling her like she was made of glass. Her eyes fluttered open, just once.
“You came for me,” she murmured.
“Always,” he breathed, voice shaking. “Always.” Then her head sank against his chest & her eyes closed.
Chapter 10: Chapter 10: The Light Within
Summary:
Wounds don’t heal easily but love remembers.
***
Chapter Text
The winds howled across the scorched hillside as the last remnants of the Dalek fortress crumbled into the horizon, its smouldering ruins casting long shadows across the sky. Ash floated like grey snow through the air, drifting softly over the small group huddled beneath the pale wash of stars.
John knelt in the wet grass, his arms wrapped tightly around Rose’s limp form, rocking her gently as if the motion could keep her tethered to the world. Her skin was ice-cold, her body far too still.
“Rose… please… stay with me,” he murmured, his voice fraying at the edges. He pressed his forehead to hers, trying to will warmth back into her flesh. “Don’t leave me now. Not after all this.”
The Doctor crouched beside them, his expression grim. He pulled out his sonic screwdriver, scanning her quickly — then again, more frantically.
“Her systems are shutting down,” he said quietly. “The fusion between human & Dalek tech—it's collapsing. The strain of resisting the programming, firing the gunstick, destroying the core… it’s overloaded every cell in her body.”
“No,” John snapped, voice suddenly sharp. “There has to be something—you’re the Doctor, you always find a way.”
The Doctor’s eyes softened. “I will but we need to stabilise her first. We need to get her somewhere safe — somewhere medical. Torchwood, UNIT, anywhere. She won’t survive if she keeps slipping like this.”
But Rose was already drifting. Her breaths grew shallower, chest rising only slightly beneath the tattered remains of her ruined dress. Glowing traces of circuitry still flickered faintly beneath her skin — dying stars in a collapsing galaxy.
Her lips moved, the barest whisper: “John…”
“I’m here, love,” he choked, brushing sweat-damp hair from her forehead.
“I’m… so tired…”
John’s voice cracked. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare give up.”
Her eyes blinked open, glassy & unfocused. For a second — just a second — they cleared. She looked up at him, a soft smile ghosting across her lips.
“You still remember… the name I gave you?”
He nodded, tears spilling freely now. “John. I’ll never forget.”
Her breathing hitched — & then stopped.
“No. No no no—ROSE!”
Her body slumped against his, completely limp.
The Doctor’s hands flew across the scanner.
“She’s not gone. Not yet but she’s slipping into a neurogenic stasis. It’s the Dalek code, locking her down like a failsafe.”
“A coma?” John asked, horror creeping into his voice.
“A deep one. Could be days, weeks, longer. Her body’s still fighting the programming. We need to cool her systems & suppress the remaining Dalek tech before it spreads again.”
John held her tighter, burying his face in the crook of her neck.
“Then I’ll stay. As long as it takes. She saved the universe. Now it’s our turn to save her.”
The Doctor looked out at the burning skyline, jaw tight. “
Then we start now.”
As the TARDIS materialised beside them & they gently lifted Rose inside, the sky above cracked with the first hint of dawn. A fragile new beginning shadowed by pain but burning with the promise of hope.
***
The first thing Rose felt was warmth.
Soft, gentle warmth, like the kiss of sunlight through gauze. Her eyelids fluttered against the light, her breath shallow, uneven. Every part of her ached — a deep, humming ache that seemed to echo in her bones — but it was human. It was hers.
She was alive.
The sound of the TARDIS hummed around her, low & melodic, like a lullaby. The scent of ozone & old books filled the air, mingled with the faint, comforting whisper of time itself moving through the ship’s heart.
She blinked.
The ceiling above her wasn’t cold & metallic. It was golden — like coral lit from within. Organic. Familiar. Safe.
She was in the TARDIS.
“Welcome back,” came a voice, broken with relief. She turned her head. Slowly. John sat beside her, his eyes rimmed red, his hand already wrapped tightly around hers. His hair was a mess, shirt stained with grease, blood & worry but his smile was pure.
“John.” Her voice was a rasp but it was hers.
He nodded, brushing a trembling hand across her cheek.
“You did it. You came back to me.”
Her eyes welled with tears, hot & unstoppable.
“I thought I’d never feel anything again.”
He leaned forward, resting his forehead against hers.
“You’re safe now. You’re you.”
Later that evening, the two of them lay side-by-side in the TARDIS garden room. A hidden sanctuary beneath a dome of soft, transparent crystal. Stars wheeled above them in an endless dance. Moonlight from a far-off system bathed the garden in silver & alien flowers swayed in a breeze that wasn’t quite wind but more a memory of it.
A thick blanket lay across their legs. Rose’s head rested on John’s shoulder, her fingers entwined with his. Her breath came a little easier now, though she still bore the marks of the past, faint circuitry etched in her skin like ghostly scars.
She tilted her head slightly, her voice quiet.
“Was I gone?”
John turned to her, brushing a strand of golden hair from her face.
“You were never gone,” he said softly. “Just lost for a while but you found your way back.”
Her eyes fluttered closed as she leaned into him. “Because of you.”
“No,” he murmured. “Because of you. I just held the light.”
A little while later, The Doctor appeared at the archway, silent, hands in the pockets of his long coat, the glow of the stars painting his face with gold & shadow. He stepped into the garden & Rose sat up slowly.
They looked at each other for a long time.
He gave her a small, fond smile. “How’re you holding up?”
“Still breathing,” she said, then smiled. “Still me.”
He nodded.
“That’s more than enough.”
There was silence. A gentle kind. One filled with unspoken things. Then the Doctor’s voice lowered.
“You don’t need saving anymore, Rose Tyler.”
Her eyes shimmered, lips trembling.
“Not even a little bit?”
He stepped forward, touched her shoulder gently.
“You’ve got your own strength now. You always did.”
She reached up & gripped his hand.
“Thank you. For never giving up.”
He gave her one last smile, that ancient, weary smile that carried a universe in it, then turned & walked back into the TARDIS corridors, leaving them to the stars.
John held out his hand.
She took it.
Together, they walked slowly to the edge of the garden, where the glass dome opened into infinity. A curtain drawn back on the cosmos itself. They stood there, side by side, hands entwined, staring into the glittering tapestry of stars. A peace settled over them not perfect, not complete but earned.
For the first time in what felt like lifetimes, Rose Tyler was free & she was home.
Chapter 11: Epilogue
Chapter Text
The TARDIS drifted through the Vortex, timeless & serene — its engines no longer groaning with urgency but purring like a cat curled up by a fire. The storm was over. The war, the wires, the screams , all of it was now memory. Scars on time. Echoes in the blood but life had bloomed again, quietly, in its own way.
The garden room had changed. Where once the soil had been dark & dry, now blossoms bloomed; gentle pinks, deep purples, golden threads of alien vines weaving through the arbours. A tree stood in the centre now; tall, graceful, its silver leaves catching starlight like chimes in the wind.
A picnic blanket lay at its roots. A flask of tea, 2 half-drunk mugs, a half-eaten plate of buttery jam tarts. A pair of boots kicked off to the side & there sat Rose. Her feet were bare, sunk into the mossy ground, her hair longer now, falling in soft waves. She wore a blue dress that moved like smoke & though the faintest circuitry still traced her collarbone like stardust scars, her skin glowed with colour once more. She looked alive. Whole.
John came up behind her & dropped a kiss onto her temple, his arms sliding around her waist as he settled down beside her. He still looked at her like he couldn’t believe she was real, like he was afraid he’d wake up & find it had all been a dream.
“You’re quiet,” he murmured.
Rose smiled, resting her head against his.
“Just thinking.”
He raised an eyebrow, mock wary.
“Dangerous, that.”
She laughed, soft & genuine.
“Thinking how far we’ve come. I still remember it, y’know. What it felt like. Being inside them. Being her.”
He took her hand gently, kissed her knuckles.
“I know. I remember every second of losing you.”
“But I’m here,” she said, more to herself than him.
“Yes,” he said. “You are.”
They sat in silence a while longer, just breathing in the starlight. Somewhere deep within the TARDIS, the Doctor wandered the halls alone, humming softly to himself, the eternal traveller, content knowing some of his family were healing in the heart of his ship.
Rose tilted her face up to the sky dome.
“D’you think we’ll ever stop running?”
John considered it, then shook his head.
“No but maybe, just maybe. we’ve started walking again.”
She smiled. Then pointed.
“Look.” Through the transparent dome above them, a new world was coming into view. Soft greens, pale oceans, white swirling clouds like brushstrokes. A fresh start. “No Daleks,” she whispered.
“No Masters,” John agreed.
“Just us.” He leaned in & kissed her slow, deep, unhurried & when they pulled apart, her eyes were brighter than the stars. They stood together, facing the dawn of a new planet & somewhere in the distance, the TARDIS sang.
SpiritWolfStar on Chapter 1 Wed 02 Jul 2025 07:05AM UTC
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Sammysammm on Chapter 1 Tue 08 Jul 2025 09:07PM UTC
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