Notes: This scene has been in my head for months, but penning (or rather typing) it has proved very difficult. I hope it comes across as well as I envisaged, or even half as well. I don’t think I gave the Emperor enough time but, all things considered, he didn’t have much of a part in the actual series, either, so I won’t lose sleep over it. :) It’s the Doctor’s drama we want to see, after all. Some of it will sound very familiar.

The Doctor yelled after Rose, his stomach gripped by a knot of terror, and strove to propel himself faster across the floor with heavy drives of his arms, desperate to reach both Rose and Hope in time; but it was not to be. He saw a Dalek’s laser arm rise from out of the corner of his eye, just on that terrible periphery of vision where all those things you’d rather not see were captured, and could do nought but watch in a helpless stupor as Rose was hit with the tremendous thud of a death ray. She shrieked before she dropped lifeless to the floor.

Everything then seemed to go silent, as if all other sound in the room had been drawn out into a vacuum, leaving nothing but the Doctor’s footsteps echoing against the floor whilst he skidded to a halt by Rose’s side.

The Doctor heard Jack’s scream, but it barely registered since he was utterly overwhelmed by the horror of Rose’s lifeless body, laid motionless beneath him. The knot in his stomach threatened to snap, his chest throbbed, his throat ached, and he fell to his knees by Rose’s side.

“No…” he murmured, the words but a whisper as he shakily extended his hands toward her and gathered her up into an embrace. He cradled her there for some time, running his fingers over her face and down her neck, breathing unsteadily all the while; she was so cold, as if she had not been alive but thirty seconds before…

The Doctor found that he couldn’t speak. There wasn’t a word in any language he knew that was worth saying right now, not one that could articulate such pain, loss or disbelief. He simply brought Rose’s head up closer to his and rested his nose over the dip below her forehead, where her eyes were now firmly locked shut. His fingers sought for a grip in her hair, and he clutched the golden locks as if they were something so precious, he couldn’t possibly let them go. In truth, he just couldn’t bare to take any of this in.

“I’m sorry,” was all he eventually found it possible to say, and he buried his nose in her blonde locks as tears rolled down his face and his body shook. “This is all my fault.”

Jack hovered uneasily in the background as he witnessed this small scene, his eyes transfixed by the form of the Doctor, sat hunched over the young, human woman who had redeemed him, brought him back from the edge, and in many ways saved his life. The fact that they were all surrounded by myriads of Daleks didn’t matter, nor that these Daleks were closing in on them - all that registered was the tragedy in the centre of the room.

It was only after this small moment had passed that the Doctor felt the anger kick in. A red haze of rage fell over his vision and his eyes rose from their hiding place, buried in Rose’s hair, to look upon the child at the centre of this whole fiasco. Hope stared back at him as if nothing had happened, her visage at complete peace with herself, and a faint smile playing upon her lips.

“Everything has its time and everything dies,” she murmured.

The Doctor felt his own lips tremble in contempt, his own words thrown back at him, and he gently lay Rose down on the floor before he got unsteadily to his feet and glared at the girl. Suddenly, all blame converged on this little creature that he had created, this audacious and foolish infant for which he suddenly felt little or no compassion. His dark side engulfed him once again, the tragedies of the Time War, and the mass murder he’d been forced to deliver to his own race returning to haunt him and threaten to push him over the edge, on to revenge.

“What have you done?” he demanded in clipped tones, his fingers flexing at the end of his rigid arms.

Hope just stared back, replying with nought but the faint and grating smile that still hovered over her lips, as if this was all somehow to her amusement.

“Hope, your mother!” the Doctor roared, pointing. “She’s dead!”

“It doesn’t matter.”

The Doctor’s eyes flashed. He could hear Jack yelling at him from behind, no doubt telling him to calm down, but it was no use. He wasn’t listening.

“How dare you?” he growled. “How can you say such a thing?”

“Everything has its time and everything dies. You know this.”

“Enough!” he yelled. “Just stop this! Stop it now!”

Hope laughed, a terrible, little laugh of disdain. “You can’t make me. You are nothing!”

The Doctor’s chest rose and fell as he inhaled deeply, realising, with horror, that she was right. He was powerless.

Behind him, that grotesque monolith that was the Dalek Emperor revelled in Hope’s verbal assault and guffawed terribly, his monstrous laugh cutting the Doctor to the quick. “How fitting,” he gloated. “The child rises to cast the father down in flames. What a wonderful thing she is!”

Hope ignored this, however, and remained focused on the Doctor, staring him straight into the eyes. The glowing vortex of time swirled in the empty pits of her pupils, making her stare seem something quite eerie. “I looked into the TARDIS,” she revealed, as if proud of her achievement. “And the TARDIS looked into me.”

The Doctor swallowed, the angry haze giving way a little to rationale as each battled for control of his mind; but the conflict was far from won, and his ire still boiled hotly deep within. He glanced briefly at the TARDIS, his ship clearly a willing accomplice in all this, before he returned his focus to Hope. “You’ve looked into the Time Vortex,” he stated, his face strained, his pupils constricted, “Don’t you understand? No one’s meant to see that!”

Hope again said nothing, but her creepy smile became only more prominent, infuriating her already frenzied father.

“And what was this meant to achieve, Hope?” the Doctor continued. “What were you planning to do?” He then laughed, his words as cold and cutting as an icy gale. “Look around you! Look at the mess we’re in! Surrounded by Daleks, your mother dead!”

The Doctor’s final word, weighted down by a leaden grief and resentment, seemed to finally pierce the ghostly shell within which Hope was cocooned, and her eyes darted toward her mother’s corpse, as if seeing it for the first time, before she asked plainly, “Dead?”

“Yes,” the Doctor went on, “Dead because of you!” He heard another protest from Jack, some kind of drabble along the lines of ‘go easy on her’, but he didn’t want to hear it; he didn’t have time for compassion right now. During the Time War, he had practically been stripped of such nuances, and this moment threatened to return him once again to that mindset.

“No,” Hope countered in denial, staring back at the Doctor with his own blue eyes. “It’s not true.”

“You can’t deny it,” he blustered on, another tear rolling down his face. “You brought us here--”

“No, you brought yourselves here. There was no obligation.”

“Obligation?” The Doctor laughed spitefully. “We’re your parents! Of course there was an obligation!”

“It is not my fault. It was hers.”

The Doctor went silent as he tried to comprehend this terrible, bland monster that his child had become; this creature that the Time Vortex had warped her into. Even though he knew it was hardly his child speaking from those lips, and that her true self was somewhere deep within, possibly fighting for space in a mind that was overcrowded by an all-powerful force, he couldn’t find the will to forgive her, or to help her. It was these character flaws, these fractured parts of his person, that Rose had striven so hard to mend, to kiss better little by little - and now all that work was falling to pieces because of a child they had allowed themselves to engender. They were being torn apart by their own flesh and blood, a tragedy common to the lives of parents throughout the universe, though not on a scale such as this.

“It’s her fault?” the Doctor queried, each syllable muted.

“Yes.”

“For trying to save you? For giving up her life?”

“It is the truth.”

“No! She is dead because of you!”

“No.”

“Yes! You‘ve killed your own mother!”

“NO!”

And it was then that Hope’s true power manifested itself. Her eyes shone bright for a second, yellow light pouring out of them, before she extended a hand toward the Doctor and, in a threatening demonstration of power, sent him flying back along his own time stream.

Jack gaped in utter disbelief, and it would seem the Daleks along with him, as he witnessed the Doctor’s features warp and change as he was sent back into his own past.

The Time Lord collapsed onto the floor, flailing and struggling, until he lay there with the body and face of his former regeneration. He then breathed heavily and looked at his child from out of different eyes, and with different perceptions. He knew what had happened, but he could barely comprehend it; and his body was in so much pain.

“I am the Bad Wolf,” Hope announced, giving the words a sense of omnipotence.

The Doctor felt a further pang of shock penetrate him to his core at this; the words that had haunted both he and Rose throughout all their adventures, the curse that had overshadowed their every move and deed… it was her?

“The Bad Wolf?” he asked.

But, before he knew it, Hope was sending him reeling back from his eighth form into his seventh, dragging a scream of agony up from the depths of his soul. His body was one convulsing mass of pain, his every cell crying out in protest as they were forced to alter in the brief spell of but a second, reverting to a form they had long thought it impossible to regress to.

“Yes,” Hope finally continued. “Traces of me are left throughout time and space, my precursors and successors, a message to lead you here; signs of what was transpiring until my form became physical, and until the Doctor became whole.”

“Whole?” he asked, voice weak and feeble. He felt his frame tremble with another seizure as his child now sent him from his seventh form into his sixth, his dark hair weaving out into curly blond, his lines of age fading into a rounder and slightly more youthful countenance.

“Hope, please stop!” he pleaded in yet another voice, and another which for years had been alien to him.

“Yes, whole,” Hope went on, ignoring his entreaty. “A man of feeling, of emotions and of purpose.”

The Doctor was baffled, unable to take in either her words, or what she was doing to him.

“A true Time Lord,” she elucidated, “with something to live for.”

The Emperor Dalek began to tire of this show. “The Doctor must be kept alive!” he said. “Destroy this child, this abomination!”

It was a blatant signal for his troops to prepare themselves, and all the Daleks were suddenly on the alert, moving their laser arms into position; but Hope took no heed of any of this. The Doctor was of no threat to her, and she certainly wasn’t perturbed by any number of Daleks.

“I control everything,” divine-Hope proclaimed. “Every piece of time is mine to hold and to touch, to send forward or back. I control the great time stream, and its every tributary - including yours.”

The Doctor braced himself as she caused his form to alter once more, the body of his sixth self giving way to the body before it, and a face that was even more youthful, and possessed of an uneasy manner. “Hope” he ventured again, the voice falling feeble on his dry lips. “Please, listen to me.”

But his pleas fell on deaf ears. “I command the sun and moon,” she continued. “The day and night!”

Another wave of pain coursed through the Doctor and he was in his fourth form, tall and bold, with a voice like thunder, yet all he could manage to utter was another cry of agony, wishing more than anything that the pain would stop, and that this whole extraordinary situation would just go away.

“My destiny is almost fulfilled,” Hope ascertained. “And now but one task remains.”

The Doctor swallowed, certain that whatever her destiny was, it could not turn out for the best. He was soon after thrown back into his third body, hair turning grey, face etched with lines, with a voice both genteel and refined.

“Hope,” he barked at her sharply, finding his tongue, “you have to stop this. You have to stop this now!”

He managed to haul himself up onto his hands and knees, though his every movement caused further surges of pain to shoot through his limbs, but before he had chance to say more to his daughter, she hurled his body back yet another generation. He transformed into his second form, before collapsing onto the floor once more.

He heaved a deep breath, his substantially shorter legs struggling to find a footing as the hems of his jeans fell over them, and his leather jacket weighed him down. “You’ve got the entire vortex running through your head!” he warned her, the timbre of his voice again different. “You’re going to burn!”

But she just sent him back one final time into the first of his many faces, the older man looking quite out of place in the get-up of his ninth regeneration. “Enough!” he demanded of the child. “No more, Hope! No more! This has to stop!”

Hope giggled as if this was all a game, and cast him back through his every generation until he returned to his present form, pale and sweating, hearts pounding, and every cell in his body whining in protest, ready to keel over and die.

“I can send you forward, too,” she warned him, “I can do anything. Return every senior citizen to a foetus, every frog to a tadpole, every fossil to a living organism, and vice versa. I am the future and the past. I am time and tide.”

‘What have you done, my TARDIS?’ was the question now at the forefront of the Doctor’s mind as he tried once again to redeem Hope. “But this is all wrong!” he told her, struggling to regain his balance and return to his feet, though he did ultimately manage it. “These forces aren’t ours to control!”

“Why not?”

The Doctor shook his head. Would nothing get through to this child? Would no words of reason crack the shell and reach the innocent five-year-old beneath?

“Doctor!” Jack yelled, finally rushing up toward him and turning his gun sight on the rapidly approaching Daleks. “We’ve got other problems to deal with here.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” the Doctor snapped.

Jack didn’t reply, but let out a volley of fire at the nearest line of Daleks, a vain attempt at holding them back, but his every bullet merely faded into the oblivion of their force-fields. “Shit, shit, shit…” he grumbled.

“Everything has its time,” Hope continued to preach, “and your time--” Here she indicated the Daleks. “-- has come.”

Her eyes turned on the Emperor Dalek and penetrated his person to the core, looking beyond his slimy, purple exterior into the haunting presence of the creature within, and somehow, this simple action made the Emperor very nervous indeed, as if she truly had penetrated him to the core. “Destroy her!” he crowed in a rising panic, unable to comprehend the power which this child currently possessed, and wanting rid of it. “Exterminate them all!”

The Doctor wheeled about one-hundred-and-eighty degrees as he heard a death ray come his way, and he faced it full-on, ready to die as it pelted toward him. He closed his eyes and waited for the pain and subsequent darkness… but it never came; opening his eyes again, he saw that the beam had stopped short, and was hovering mere centimetres from his chest, before it slowly began to retract back into the laser arm of the Dalek from whence it had come. The Doctor didn’t need to turn around to know that this was Hope’s doing.

“Do not fear, father,” she said. “I shall protect you from the false god.”

The Doctor exhaled, the brush with death too near, and wondered why Rose hadn’t received the same kind of protection. Perhaps this was a Time Lord issue. He didn’t have time to care, though, and swiftly turned around with Jack to watch Hope face-off with the lord of the Daleks.

“You cannot hurt me!” the Emperor arrogantly hollered at her, “I am immortal.”

“You are tiny!” Hope retorted. “I can see the whole of time and space, every single atom of your existence, and I divide them!”

The Doctor jumped as he heard a strange explosive noise to his left and he watched as one of the Daleks began to decompose into golden atoms and fade into nothingness. Slowly but surely, every one of the others followed suit.

“My brethren!” the Emperor yelled, eye darting round in horror as he saw his every precious soldier disintegrate around him. “No!”

And he then looked down at Hope again, eye connecting with her face as he said, willing himself to believe it, “I will not die! I cannot die!” But soon he too was starting to fade away, the tips of his tentacles breaking up into golden globules, the arms then following, before his whole person and his gigantic metal exterior were also decaying into nothingness, and being cast across the wide expanse of time.

Jack gawped around himself in disbelief, turning this way and that as Dalek after Dalek disappeared, their confused cries being soaked up by the vortex of time, whilst the Doctor could do nothing but watch his young and tiny child do the impossible, and cast the Daleks into dust. It pained him to see it; it was such an act of vigour and exertion, which he knew would induce death in any normal person, be they human or alien, something which he refused to let happen to his little girl.

“Everything dies,” Hope repeated one final time as the last of the Daleks faded away, and she then remained stood there, completely still, continuing to give off her golden glow.

The Doctor knew he had to act now. “Jack, take Rose, quickly. Into the TARDIS.”

Jack hitched his gun over his shoulder and knelt by Rose’s side, taking her cold body up into his arms before he said, “But what about you?”

The Doctor rounded on him, his visage pale but nevertheless filled with a steely determination. “Just do it!”

Jack swallowed in the face of the ‘oncoming storm’, and did as he was told, clutching Rose tightly and retreating into the Doctor’s ship. This left the Doctor to confront Hope alone and do what he had to do. He slowly paced forward and looked down on his child with a feeling of fear in his hearts. “Okay, you’ve done it,” he murmured to her, “Now you have to stop. You must stop!”

Hope didn’t seem to hear him at first, but after a while, an unearthly voice emerged from her lips, a straggling whisper that was undoubtedly Hope’s true self, struggling to break free from her trance. “I can’t,” she muttered.

“You must,” the Doctor insisted. “Let go.”

Hope again shook her head, but tears were now welling in her eyes as she cried out helplessly, “I can’t!”

The Doctor felt his eyes well up in turn. He couldn’t lose the mother and the daughter; it would destroy him.

He dropped to his knees and stared deep into her eyes, which, far from being their ordinary pale blue, continued to swirl and pulse with the bright light of the Time Vortex, taken over by its all-consuming power.

“Please let go,” he implored.

“But I can do so much,” Hope said. “I can bring life!” She rose her hands into the air beside her as if she were truly replenishing a deceased soul, but the Doctor knew, no matter how much the idea sometimes appealed to him, that this could not continue. “You can’t do this, Hope,” he said softly, “no one can control life and death.”

“But I can!”

“You shouldn’t!”

“I can do anything.”

“Just let go, Hope, the power’s too much - it’ll destroy you!”

“But I can see everything.” There was then a falter in Hope’s face, a cringe as if in pain.

The Doctor was struggling with his temper again and trying to keep himself in check, but he was becoming desperate, and his child, as stubborn as he was, was refusing to give in.

“Hope please!” he begged. He had to help her quickly because the Dalek ship itself was now falling apart around them, breaking down into atoms like the Daleks that had recently populated it.

“I can see it all,” Hope continued to tell him, as if she had to share the wonder of it with him and hope that he would understand why part of her wanted to retain this power. “All of time and space; all that is, all that was… everything.”

“I see that too, Hope,” the Doctor whispered, trying once more to get through to her, “but it’s a curse as well as a blessing. It drives you mad.”

Hope choked on her tears, seeming not to hear him. “But I can also see what will never be,” she lamented. “What can never happen. What will never happen.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t want to know that!” And now she looked him straight in the eyes. “You can’t die!”

The Doctor threw his arms around her and held her to him. Nothing mattered anymore except her, and she had to live. “Easy there,” he whispered as he felt her body, like a hot iron, sear and tear at his already fractured soul. “Let go of it. Give it to your daddy.”

“You can’t go!”

He forced himself to ignore her. “Let it go. Let me take it away.”

Hope was crying onto his shoulder now, tears that felt as though they were blazing through his leather jacket, and the Doctor ground his teeth together, trying to concentrate on alleviating his only child of all the pain and torment she had unwittingly inflicted upon herself.

As he clasped her to him and murmured soothing words to her, he indeed felt the vortex begin to seep along her tiny arms and, from where her hands clasped his neck, permeate through his skin and into his body. The entire vortex of time and space was entering his bloodstream and flowing round his veins, and soon, it would break him.

“Good girl,” he whispered. The pain was incredible, but the girl in his arms was worth so much more than his life. He felt her small hands shift as she strove to hold onto him ever the more tightly as he proved to be the antidote to her suffering, and, soon enough, Hope’s mind had cleared, and she felt relatively normal again… just incredibly tired.

The Doctor sighed as he felt Hope stoop against him, her strength ebbing and her body collapsing beneath the strain of what she’d just done. He turned his head to her and planted a kiss on her cheek; “Well done,” he whispered before, his eyes catching hers for one final time, and his being the ones that were this time filled with the glowing vortex, she fainted in his grasp.

He closed his eyes and gathered his last reserves of strength to make it back onto his feet, needing his legs to bear his weight just a little longer as he carried his child across the floor and into the TARDIS.

“Doctor!” Jack cried as he stepped through the doorway.

The Doctor looked across at Jack and his face actually lit up, for he saw that Rose was alive! He couldn’t believe it. “Rose…” he gasped.

Jack held onto Rose as she drowsily picked out the Doctor with her blurry eyes. “Doctor…?” she murmured before, events taking their toll, she blacked out again, and Jack lay her gently on the floor.

“She just woke up,” Jack blurted, completely taken aback. “It’s a miracle, Doctor!”

The Doctor looked down at his daughter knowingly and smiled again. “Maybe it is,” he muttered, before he reminded himself that time was of the essence and he got to work.

“Jack, quick,” he said, pacing towards the man and handing him his daughter. “Take her…”

Jack promptly took Hope from him whilst the Doctor put a good distance between them and stared up at the TARDIS. He gave her an admonishing look, one which promised long words were to be had later on, before he gave her console a kick, forcing a panel of it to open, into which he spewed the entirety of the vortex, finally emptying his body of the burden, and sending it reeling back into the heart of the TARDIS.

The glare of the vortex was so bright, Jack was forced to turn away, and even though Hope was currently unconscious, he shielded her eyes as well. When he finally found it safe to turn round again, he saw that the Doctor was busying himself getting the TARDIS into flight, making sure that they escaped the Dalek spaceship before it completely crumbled around them. It didn’t take Jack long to notice though, as he studied the man carefully, that there was a real agony in his eyes, and that his body, having taken onboard and manipulated the entire Time Vortex, was very weak indeed.

“Are you okay, Doctor?” he dared to ask.

The Doctor made no reply, but the way he feebly tugged the levers and half-heartedly flicked the switches told Jack all he needed to know. He swallowed, wondering whether or not to continue to voice his fears, but one look at the Doctor’s eyes told him not to bother, for they remained as sharp and focused as ever; the Doctor had done what he had had to do, and no one was to ask him any questions about it…

Once they were safely away from the fading Dalek ship, the Doctor at last stopped in his tracks and shared a significant look with Jack. Jack swallowed again, but said nothing in return.

Acknowledging this with a nod, the Doctor then stepped away from the console, and slowly walked round in Jack’s direction, stopping in front of the Captain and stooping down to plant a farewell kiss on his daughter’s forehead.

Jack felt his stomach churn at this, an ever-growing sensation of dread rising in his mind. “Doctor…” he sighed, unable to hold his silence any longer; but the Doctor only glanced at him and shook his head, asking him not to say a word.

Jack could thus only continue to watch as the man then knelt down by Rose’s side and pressed a kiss to her lips, a kiss which said ‘goodbye’, before he returned to the TARDIS console, emitted a sigh, and pressed down on a button. He then took a few paces back.

“This is Emergency Programme Two,” he said, staring straight ahead. “Now Rose, just listen…”