Late one night, this third year of sharing a world, they had come home triumphant from the week's work and tipsy from ringing in Donna's birthday. They bumbled down the hallway, batted round an astrophysics riddle and agreed on an absurd solution, and then made it to the bed to model their more heroic moments ineptly for each other. ("Doctor, I can't be the Kray unless you hold still. You're Rose now, and time's barely moving for you compared to me. Do it properly, and I'll show you how we caught him.") Manifestly not at their most impressive, they turned out to be more in shape for a snogging, which was more playful than intense, until it wasn't.

In the back of his mind he'd laughed at himself, remembering how he'd once looked forward to their sharing a bed with only the simple anticipation of a new game with a beloved friend. ("You honestly want me to still call you Doctor in bed? Still, could be worse. You said that other bloke called himself the Master?") How thoroughly he'd missed the point, but in another way, not really.

They'd been under the blanket, Rose just starting the lazy drift down from her peak and going on in sweetly filthy detail, as she did when things were going well for her. He'd been listening greedily to her inspired creativity this time round, burying his hand in her hair, his wedding band glinting in it as they moved, adrift in the touch and sound of her.

The room around him was amber, gold, neither; a palace familiar like a favorite book, and new in every intricate corner like a small universe. Walls reflected her left-behind dreams of gymnastic glory and the frozen waves of a long-ago planet, and the odd flicker of the time vortex that had once blazed in every nook.

It took him several seconds to realize what he was adrift in was her mind.

He went utterly still. He extricated himself carefully and dropped back alone into his own body. He rolled down onto his side and caught her shoulders, heart pounding. What a way to derail the moment.

"Rose. I'm so sorry. Did I scare you?"

She shook her head and laid one hand over his heart. She was panting a bit. "No, it's all right. I let you in. What happened?"

He sighed; his pulse began to settle. What indeed. "Something I've got no memories of doing in this situation. It's usually more a car mechanic sort of role, figuring out where the clunking's from." He shook his head and raised himself up on one elbow. "I'm never drinking before getting lucky again. Possibly never, just to keep the option open. Sure you're all right?"

Rose mirrored him, up on the opposite elbow, and lifted her free hand to his face. Her fingertips traced down his cheek, his jaw. Her eyes met his, inviting. "Want to try it again?"

He blinked, but that alchemy of trust and desire in her face was intoxicating; his body woke a moment later and betrayed his reaction. He lifted his hand back to her temple. "It's not something I need, love. Obviously, from the evidence to date. I…"

She ran her hand down his arm and spread his fingers, and flashed him a grin. "I wouldn't mind another go myself. If you want."

He laughed back; his heart pounded in a different way. He did a quick-and-dirty calculation of their blood alcohol levels based on body weight and time since consumption. Both still a bit sloshed, but not decision-ruiningly so.

"No memories for now," he had answered after a moment, his voice low in his own ears. "There are things in my head we don't want in yours." First among them, the true name from his other self, dangerous baggage in any universe. "Whatever you want me to see, think of a door, and open it."

He led her into his own mind first, thankful for the remaining liquid courage. He laid open there the animal warmth of the past hours, and the satisfactions of their work for this Earth, lit by the sweet glow of this life they'd grown. The unforgotten stars, which could wait a while longer. The fear of failing the charge laid on him to defend this world, or committing more violence trying to uphold it, for lack of his other self's insane certainty of always finding another way. The way the thought of her at odd moments filled him with out-of-context happiness.

"All right so far?" he whispered, half-aloud, feeling most profoundly naked. "Are you still sure?"

Her answer was a wash of delight, fascination and understanding. Then a few moments later, a mixed surge of shyness and abandon, as she opened her mind to him in turn.

She showed him there her slow-grown love for this adopted Earth; he expected, beneath it, the familiar shared half-buried longing for the TARDIS, for that blaze of possibility just before the door opened each time. And there it was.

But the stronger image was predawn tea and donuts, on terrible chairs in a borrowed lab, with a Doctor marked with fading claw scars and a wedding band.

He'd denied to himself having the question. He'd tried so hard not to expect her to pretend it was simple, to hold to the Gallifreyan wisdom that made no distinction between his selves. But it was written there; she loved him, half-human and unplanned, the Mayfly Doctor, with no ship just yet but a fine array of contraband toys. She loved him with a heart-stopping intensity that had frightened her as it grew, and did still.

And the shameless spike of triumph he felt at that made clear he was part human in this way too, and had been fooling himself all along.

Somewhere in that moment he noticed, dimly, the fading outlines of her other old fears he hadn't even guessed at – something about being too human, too limited. Amazing, he'd thought, his heart still reeling, what minds would fixate on to keep from hoping too much.

Rose had laughed in agreement, hands framing his face as the understanding still shuddered through him. Though he'd suspected, later, she might have known that all along.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

The probe pulled him back to the present. His other self had finally decided.

Do you accept, the Time Lord sent, that you have to drop the connection if they call for you? I'm not sure whether memory really tells you how hard it is. No one will call you Destroyer of Worlds, but you'll never forget. But you must do it.

I love this world too, he replied. Rose and Donna and Tony and Jackie and so many others. Even a nameless Torchwood director. I won't endanger it.

When we're done, you'll have to direct the TARDIS to release me. It will obey only you until you certify me sane.

He grinned. I may be forced at some point, under strict necessity, to do a barrel roll.

I need to tell you something first, though. In case this doesn't end well.

He braced himself. Now's the time.

Remember our last shared memory before you split, his other self sent. Just before I cast off the spark that became you. Remember what we were running toward. I didn't lie to you, on the beach, but it didn't seem the place for the whole truth. You weren't born only in battle. So much more so, you were born in love.

The Metacrisis Doctor sat back and took a heavy breath. He blinked furiously a few times, then gave up and wiped his eyes. You're ruining my navigation. Are you locked in?

Locked in. From here on, believe nothing I say till the sensors are off again. Allons-y.

He started the one-second cycle on reception from the TARDIS sensors, took a last reading on the fleet location, and flung the TARDIS toward the breach.

It was like running through a night forest with a stuttering flashlight. The TARDIS sensor data was far better than the probe's; he saw them, somehow still winged but not remotely organic, with engine intakes for heads, full of the cold fire of spacetime's merciless bookkeeping. He dodged where he could, and fired out the dissonance frequency to clear his path where he couldn't.

He was leaping around the probe console as if it were a different one, in a ship with a huon heart; he could almost believe the TARDIS saw his face across the worlds and knew him as her own.

His other self was ranting, cluttering up the frequency, fully in the reapers' grip; he got snatches of it with the data dump every second. Something about, unsurprisingly, cleansing. He tried not to think of what it must feel like, and pushed on.

Then, as he'd suspected, their density ramped up as he approached the rift. They might be without consciousness, but the reapers had their one own way of sterilizing, and were no friends to the ad hoc Time Lord stitch-it-up-as-you-go approach; they were coalescing in his path. The ship took a shuddering blow to the flank, revectored and pressed on. He hoped his other self's restraints were done with an eye to crash safety.

Then another.

He shook his head, took a deep breath, and looked round the room. Not where he'd hoped to die. Entombed in Dalekanium – the millions of Daleks on his conscience might have been amused, if they were capable.

He activated the autodestruct timer, then dropped the data interval to a half-second. Then a quarter.

The visibility became splendid; he could get round the reapers again. Minutes to the rift.

And then of course the reapers noticed, and the probe's pulse began to whisper with the silvery syllables of their ancient name.

His other self was frantic, half-breaking through, incoherent. Drop it, you lunatic! I am the Destroyer of Worlds. We must polish spacetime smooth of sparks and stars. You can't imagine what you'll do. I can't watch. If I could reach the controls, I'd wipe it all clean. Rose, forgive me. Cut the link!

I'm locked in a containment room, he paused long enough to send back, to whatever part of his other self could still hear him. Pete became paranoid about signals from other universes after Canary Wharf. Seems he was right after all. Be at peace.

The reapers were nearly touching each other. He made the data feed nearly continuous, with an interruption at one-second intervals. Almost there.

And that was when they got through.

The true name embraced him. It seeped along his axons from one neuron to the next, ringing with clarity and peace. Only one thing to do, no more choices, no more loss; cleanse and be cleansed. He shuddered; his hand extensors spasmed.

He dropped to his knees, gripped one hand with the other, and kept steering. But he was sinking, he was only a Metacrisis, and if the Time Lord couldn't fight it, a lone hand in a jar had no chance. The waters closed over him.

He let the mobile drop. It was time to cleanse the world.

And then the Donna bits, which were not having it, caught fire.

Down the daisy chain of his mind, from one synapse to another, they put it to the rest of him with brutal Chiswick clarity that that was not their true name at all, and therefore not his, and it was time to get hands back on the wheel, Spaceman.

He broke the water line, gasped, and pushed the lid off the jar. The tendrils of the name binding pulled at him like cobwebs, like gravity. He stayed on his knees and kept steering.

The TARDIS broke through. He groped his way into the chair, set up the line of sight, and deployed the fire at the heart of the TARDIS to cauterize the tear. The reapers went mad around it.

His other self was still ranting, but the flavor of it had changed. Unanticipated nominal anomaly. Incomplete nominal lock. Unregulated spaciotemporal rift reversal. Polish? You did it. You did it.

His mind was still crackling with the slow burn of the rebellious synapses. His true name was apparently a mongrelized unknown, part Time Lord, part human. A new creation. Donna would have been pleased.

The rift was closing. He turned his attention back to the reapers, still a danger to the ship if not the universe. But they were already winking out, clearing the sky like stars at dawn.

He waited till the TARDIS sensors went silent. Then he directed her to release and recognize the Time Lord. All right there?

All right. You were brilliant. You are a maniac and should not be allowed to drive a golf cart.

You may not have long in absolute time before it reopens, he replied, panting. You'd better move on quickly, he started to continue, and then stopped as he remembered. He ceased feeling remotely victorious.

He had only given his other self the chance to face a different death. Maybe a better one, but that was mostly the sort of thing the living said to console each other.

I'm so very sorry, he sent instead. He looked down at his hands, back under his own control. I wish I could be there.

I am, his other self replied, so glad you're not. I think that will let me go on. I don't think the rift will reopen.

Baffled, he sent back: Why? You're not afraid to die any more? Was the name binding that bad?

Don't think it's dying I was afraid to do, he answered.

Afraid to do what, then?

To stop loving them. All of you. Always her. And Martha, Jackie, Mickey, Sarah Jane, Jack, Donna, you. The new man moves on and never looks back. He'll love others, and they'll be just as brilliant. But they won't be mine. Losing them is bearable - it happens, when you live long enough. But to stop missing them…

He nodded, as if his other self could see. It struck him, absurdly, that love acted a bit like gravity - drawing together a few particular bits of stardust into new creations, rising solid and specific from the uniform scatter of the cosmos. There were all the empty halls of the multiverse between them, and he would have done anything to be able to put a hand on his shoulder.

I know. The other reason I sought their analogues out here. To never forget. But whatever you face, and when you're a new man without these old griefs, while I live, I won't stop loving them.

I know. That's why I can bear it. Outlive me, and remember them for both of us. I still don't want to go. But I think that now I can.

You should go and see them, he sent desperately. See them all before you die. For that matter, take a vacation first. Go somewhere tropical. You have time. For the love of God, you have a time machine.

He waited a long time for a reply, watching the display. Stillness had fallen again in the heavens of Mars; there was only the planet itself, spinning on in its appointed path. Finally he realized no reply was coming. He wondered if the TARDIS receiver had finally burned out, or if his other self had just left.

He could be abrupt that way. But sometimes, apparently, it was because he didn't trust himself.

The Metacrisis rubbed his eyes. Gritty stubble was coming in along his jaw, and he needed a shower. He needed Rose. He reached over and turned off the probe.

Exactly four seconds later, the door snicked, thumped, and then slid roughly open. A forest of black rifle barrels bristled through first, the men massed behind obscured by thick black body armor.

He took a breath. He could still see their eyes.

"Hallo, Freddie," he said brightly. "Hallo, Max. And hallo, Pete. It's a good thing you brought enough guns. Is Rose there?"

Pete slipped to the front, but stayed in the doorway. "She left half an hour ago. We tailed her home."

Tailed her? He took a closer look at Pete. There was something haggard in his face that made him suspect they'd had words in the past few hours which wouldn't easily be taken back.

He fished out the ordinary mobile. With the door open, the signal was back.

Rose answered on the third ring. He could hear the strain of the past four hours in her voice, the unbelieving broken hope. "Doctor?"

"I'm so sorry. I'm fine. I'll tell you everything. Are you home?"

She let out one ragged breath, and then laughed. There was an unhinged edge to it, and it took her a moment to get speech back in order.

"Yes. Can you walk? I'm not welcome there just now. I've been up in the attic."

With the daughter-TARDIS. His breath hitched. Only one reason for that. "Are you all right?"

"Everything's fine. Pete will let you go. He promised that much, if the signal broke." The unconscious chill in her voice confirmed his suspicions.

Hands up, he brushed past Pete and through the guards without a word. They pulled back to let him through. Not that flavor of fanaticism, after all.

Halfway down the hall, he stopped and turned round. "The probe will explode in fourteen minutes and twelve seconds. You may want to move anything you're especially attached to."

Rose met him, half-running, on the street in the cold predawn. Her eyes were pink; she stopped wordlessly, framed his face in her chilly hands, and took him in for a long moment. He drank in the sight and feel, his mind moving in the wrong frames for words. He could think only of the billions of ways they could have missed having this detail.

"You're all right?"

I'm always all right, his other self would have said. "I will be."

They stumbled inside, he kicked the door closed, and they leaned against the foyer wall, surrounded by shoes and umbrellas, forehead to forehead. She was shaking with adrenaline, her fingers restless on his back. He saw the daughter-TARDIS behind her on the table, tools scattered around it, with a crowbar wedged a finger's breadth into its plasmic shell. But intact.

She would have been preparing to threaten or cajole Pete into opening the door, with her on the ready, depending what came out, to look into the Time Vortex at the heart of the TARDIS, and take up the mantle of the Bad Wolf again. The powers of a demigod, and a life expectancy of twenty minutes.

"Were you more expecting," he whispered, "to save me, or contain me?"

She shook her head against him. "Only way I could think of to do both. I'd be in by now, too, if you hadn't shatterfried the shell. Fair warning, we've got Mum and Donna converging, ten minutes out. What happened?"

He closed his eyes, felt her ribs rise and fall under his hands, and told her.

In the back of his mind, he thought of the future as he spoke; he suspected they were both unemployed now. He had a dim idea of teaching, of their seeking out apprentices. This world would always need defending, and the TARDIS would live a long time.

It was a rubbish idea for a Time Lord, so he liked it.

God's in His heaven, an Earth saying went; all's well with the world. It wasn't, entirely, and he wasn't certain which God. Anyway, his other self – far but unforgotten, whether he remembered them or not - would not entirely have approved.

That was all right. Now he was breaking rules for both of them.