Bad Wolf Ballet

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am reposting this story because I have finally edited the heck out of Act Three. I never liked what I had done there; it was rushed and anticlimactic as all get-out. I plead writing fatigue. The basic plotlines may not be much different (spoilers!) (OK, they're no different at all), but I hope how we get there is much more entertaining. Plus, I got a kickass new pic. Don't be fooled by the tiny new chapter count – it's still a novel-length fic, even longer than before! I combined each section into a single file (and therefore a single online chapter) for ease of handling.

New readers are strongly urged to begin with the first story in this series, ReichWorld. Many details herein won't make sense without it.

This rewrite is dedicated to my good friend Rodney Dobson, who passed away at a ripe old age in Dec 2016. Rodney loved his native England, good writing, and Doctor Who. If you also love the last two, you could do much worse than find his profile here (same name) and follow his favorites and reviews. I will always miss you dreadfully, mi amigo. I only wish I had finished this rewrite in time for you to read it; I think you would have approved.

Lastly, I had to page through these files online to add dividing lines and to bold/center chapter titles. I'm sure I missed one. Please let me know, and if you see any typos. Thanks!

Prelude

Original (Alpha) Universe, some time in the 2030's

They struck without warning.

Captain Jack Harkness was sitting in his office in the Torchwood Hub, staring morosely at the superphone he'd accidently unearthed from the bottom drawer. It had stopped working several years ago, no answer any time he called Jared and Rose off in their own universe. He'd never had the courage to check for them on his version of the dimension cannon, humming to itself on autopilot over in the corner of the Hub. He didn't want to know. Deciding he still didn't, he reburied the phone back in the bottom drawer.

As he was bent over, the door to the tunnels leading to the outside world was suddenly blasted off its hinges, sailing several feet into the Hub's central well – quite a feat for a hunk of solid steel. Jack peered wide-eyed over the top of his desk through the resulting smoke and caught his breath. Weevils were pouring through the door, blasting their bulky energy rifles away at everything and everybody. Weevils! Using weapons! Attacking en masse as though... directed!

Shaking off the shock, Jack vaulted over his desk, pulling out his pistol as he went, knelt at the railing, and began picking off weevils. One coldly furious corner of his mind registered the human bodies already falling, as his current Torchwood crew reacted too slowly to the invasion.

An impossibly deep voice yelled from a communicator one of the aliens was carrying, setting off a tiny explosion in the back of Jack's mind, but he couldn't stop to analyze it right then. The weevils, reacting to the voice, had turned their fire on him. He vaulted over the railing and down onto the catwalk below, sprinting to a hulking slag of burning metal and glass that moments before had been Shelly's workstation. He knelt down behind it, ignoring as best he could Shelly's lifeless body to one side, and continued returning fire.

Most of the weevils had turned back to the Hub in general, apparently bent on destroying everything. Then the one carrying the comm unit stepped forward in response to another deep barked command, pulled something off his belt, fiddled with it, and threw it in a long arc towards Jack's hiding place. Jack zeroed in on the grenade and stood, turning slightly sideways, preparing to bat the thing back to the thrower. It was the only thing he could do.

Time dilated as the grenade serenely sailed across the Hub. Jack suddenly found his attention arrested by that voice. Wait! WAIT! I KNOW THAT VOI-

The grenade exploded two inches from his hand, and the world went black.

Act One – The Man With Sea-Green Eyes

Plans

Original (Alpha) Universe, 2064 AD

Paul Corvantes was obsessed with two things: power and himself.

In the first, he wasn't at all unusual. Any given population of Homo Sapiens will have a percentage of those who are similarly obsessed, and who go about obtaining and keeping that power in a fairly usual number of ways. Corvantes' way was via the usual underworld methods: he was the typical ruthless crime boss, with tentacles reaching far across the face of the planet from his home base in London, and in all areas of illegal operations, from drugs to prostitution to money laundering to black marketeering to collecting politicians and police officials.

Recently he had chanced to come upon an abandoned facility hidden in the sewer system underneath Cardiff, full of an unworldly collection of equipment and gizmos – and a handful of moldering skeletons, two of which did not correspond to any known Earth animal, including humans. Whatever had happened here a decade or two earlier wasn't pretty.

Corvantes "the Sicilian" (so nicknamed for the birthmark on the back of his left hand in the shape of the island of Sicily) had also "acquired" a computer genius or three, and he let them lose upon the facility to discover its secrets. One of those secrets, a large contraption with complex computer systems and massive data storage, in much better condition than the rest, led in turn to his second obsession.

In this, he was completely original. For you see, it wasn't the body he inhabited that he was obsessed with, or the mind that inhabited it. It was seven other Paul Corvantes, in seven other bodies, in seven other parallel worlds.

Corvantes had discovered Torchwood's dimension cannon.

^..^

Soon after disentangling the timelines and discovering – after an idly-curious search – the ones labeled "Paul Corvantes" in each, the Sicilian's techs made another earth-shaking discovery: the Timeline Reader (as they called it) could also send things – and people – to and from those alternate realities. They made sure to run a few experiments to prove it before bringing this incredible fact to the Sicilian's attention.

And get his attention it did. Immediately cognizant of the implications of this technology, the Sicilian moved to contact his counterparts in each world, planning to join forces with each of them and spread his underworld network throughout the eight linked worlds.

It was there that his plan came to an immediate, crashing halt. NONE of the other seven Corvantes was an underworld boss. In fact, each one was disgustingly, law-abidingly, pansy-assedly moral. And none of them – not the tech company CEO, nor the pediatrician, nor the actor, not even the lawyer (constitutional law, not criminal) – NONE of them were interested in his plan, even after he managed by way of briefly "kidnapping" them all together to his own universe to convince them that the parallel worlds were real. To a one, each of them turned their matching sea-green eyes upon him and coldly announced he was on his own. Not even their shared Sicily-shaped birthmarks stirred any warmth for him in their hearts.

Reluctantly, Corvantes returned each one to their own world and life (resisting the temptation to stir the pot by mixing a couple of them up), and began to brood. How could it be that each of them had turned out so differently from himself?

He began to search back in their lives, and after a while made another startling discovery. According to the Timeline Reader, each Paul Corvantes except himself had had an encounter early in life with a certain other individual, who had influenced them so greatly that – especially in a couple of their lives – they had turned from a similar path to his own to the one they were now on, on the right side of the law. Hard on the trail, he dug down deeper, and discovered the identity of this person. The same person in each universe. He looked briefly, but couldn't find her in his own world anywhere.

If only he could reach back in time to disrupt those meetings...

And of course, that was when his two tame techies, rummaging around in the piles of junk in the Cardiff lair, found a collection of what looked like large, odd wristwatches. Upon experiment, they turned out to be miniature time travel devices – mentioned in the logs of the previous tenants as "time jumpers" from somewhere up in the distant future.

Screw the future. He was going back to the past.

Scarcely able to contain himself for the time it took for his techs to work out how to control the time jumpers, he attached one to the wrist of each of seven henchmen, and sent them through the timeline reader to the alternate worlds again – to travel backwards in time, kidnap this meddlesome woman, and bring her here to their boss. Then, he'd just see how those other Paul Corvantes turned out.

And so off they went, seven men in seven worlds, to kidnap seven women...

...named Rose Tyler.

Picking Roses

Hannah Rose Tyler was having a perfectly ordinary morning – even if it was, technically, afternoon. She never did get up before noon, anyway; one of the many parts of her chosen profession that put her at odds with the rest of society. Her client the night before had kept her up till almost dawn with his games and toys. She stretched and smiled – even though he always gave her a hell of a workout, he was still one of her favorites. Kept her on her toes – literally. And of course, he paid quite handsomely and without complaint – another huge plus.

A long hot shower took care of the residual twinges, and she threw on some grungies and sauntered out the door, leaving "Belle" behind for the afternoon. Stopping in at her favorite coffee shop for a cuppa and a pastry, she then decided to go spend some of that money on a new outfit at that ritzy seconds shop she'd discovered last week. During the two block walk, she made numerous sudden stops at shop windows to confirm: yes, the guy who'd been loitering across the street from her flat was definitely following her. Okay, that was out of the ordinary. Was it a private detective, hired by a client's suspicious wife? Probably. Well, let's make him earn his pay today.

She made a split-second turn into a noisy urban clothing store blaring hip-hop on the speakers and dashed through the racks to the rear, slipping out the back door into the alley just as her shadow entered the front, looking completely out of place in his odd suit. She grinned as she ducked behind the door and slipped down to the side street, turning right again. It would take her further from her destination, but she had plenty of time, and she wanted to play with the P.I.

Half an hour later, with no sign of him, she at last turned into the block where the seconds shop was – and literally ran right into him. He grinned and grabbed her arm with one large paw.

"Rose Tyler?" he asked.

Taken completely by surprise, she stopped trying to jerk her arm back and stared. Who on earth knew her by that name? When she wasn't Belle, she was Hannah.

Taking her staring as confirmation, the man nodded, then used his free hand to jab a button on the bulky wristwatch on the arm holding hers. And Rose's day took a decided turn for the non-ordinary, as the world was snatched away from her in a blaze of light.

^..^

Rose Tyler was having a perfectly ordinary morning. She struggled out of bed at seven to the alarm, and was halfway through her hurried shower before remembering that today was Tuesday, and her classes didn't start until ten, and she'd forgotten to set the alarm back the night before. Again.

Oh, well, she was up now. She finished her shower – at a more leisurely pace – and decided to splurge and have breakfast at Starbright's, that new bakery-and-coffee shop down the street, and see if the worldwide chain deserved its reputation. Sorting through her stacks of textbooks and folders to make sure she had the right ones, she stuffed them into her book bag and let herself out the flat door, not noticing the man across the street peering at her over his newspaper.

Halfway down the block, she heard the footsteps behind her, and glanced back. A big, hulking guy in an odd-looking jacket, two steps back, grinned at her. "Rose Tyler?" he asked, with the air of someone trying to be friendly and non-threatening when his usual M.O. was anything but.

She stopped walking and faced him, keeping an escape route open behind the bus stop shelter. "Do I know you?" she replied warily.

He pointed at the book bag on her back. "You're about to lose something there."

Automatically glancing behind her, even though she knew it for a distraction, she cursed herself as he instantly turned the point into a grab, and had a hold of her arm. Before she could twist out of his grasp, he slapped his watch with his free hand, and the world melted away, then reformed in a new configuration. Shocked witless, dizzy and suddenly nauseous, she stared around her at the utterly unfamiliar surroundings: an urban portside square. How had they gotten here? The man now was talking to someone through a mobile phone, but before she could gather her wits to demand what was going on, he tightened his hold on her arm and it happened again, another trip through a psychedelic rabbit hole.

^..^

Rose Tyler was having a perfectly ordinary morning – well, as ordinary as your wedding day morning can be, especially with a Mum like Jackie.

She and Jared, the half-human Doctor (who had taken the human name Jared Wolfe after leaving the TARDIS), had FINALLY convinced Jackie that they were NOT going to have a big splash at the Tyler mansion, by dint of threatening to hold their preferred quiet, private ceremony without inviting her. That had shut her up, and – after a whole two week's wounded silence – she calmly called to ask if there was anything she could do to help.

"No, Mum, but thanks! We've got it covered!" They really were doing it simple – a late morning ceremony at the Registrar's office, then noon dinner at the Tragenna Castle Hotel with all their guests – all twelve of them – before boarding the zeppelin for their honeymoon cruise to and around Ireland – Pete's wedding gift. There was nothing to be done but make the appropriate reservations and write their vows. Rose did relent and let Jackie take her shopping for her wedding dress, though she insisted it also be tasteful and simple – and inexpensive. She never had understood the idea of spending several hundred or a couple of thousand pounds on a dress that would only be worn once – and Jared was in complete agreement on that accord, even if Pete was footing the bill.

Pete, Jackie and little Tony had come down to St Ives on the train from London the day before, along with a couple of the London Torchwood crew that Rose had gotten to know well enough to invite (including Jake, up from Paris with his French ladyfriend). They were all staying at the Castle, while the three Torchwood techs who lived in St Ives and worked on the dimension cannon with Rose were of course bringing their dates.

Tock had woken the couple up at his usual dawn hour, wanting to go for a romp on the beach. They made him wait for both a romantic interlude and breakfast in bed, then relented and took him down the stairs. An hour later, a thoroughly wet and sandy dog was happily leading his humans back across the strand, dashing up to a strange man in street clothes below their balcony to sniff and noisily greet him.

Instead, his humans were startled and immediately wary when Tock stiffened and began growling at the stranger. He almost never reacted that way; he was the friendliest pooch in St Ives, known to all the residents.

"Can I help you?" Jared asked him, but the stranger simply shook his head, backing up another pace from the menacing dog. Jared whistled Tock off, and they turned to go around the side of their house to the front door. Rose paused at the step to lean over and try to brush some of the sand off her legs and bare feet, while Jared opened the door for the bounding dog. Tock bounced in and turned – and started barking again, a sharp, angry warning. Jared whirled around just in time to see the stranger throw his arms around Rose and stab a finger at the gizmo on his wrist, and the two of them disappeared in a flash of light, an instant before Tock reached them, launching himself off the steps and sailing through now empty air to land, bewildered, in the street beyond.

The Time Jump hit Rose's midsection hard, and she collapsed in a boneless heap wherever it was they had bounced to, head spinning, and lost her breakfast. The stranger dropped her with a disgusted snort, and she went on retching until she reached dry heaves. I haven't reacted that way to a Jump in... forever. Why now? flittered through her mind, chased away by another wave of dizziness. She was vaguely aware of the man talking, apparently on a communicator of some kind. "Hang on, she's being sick," he said sourly. "I'm not carrying that back."

When her stomach finally stopped heaving, she started to try to get up, but he forestalled her, grabbing her arm in a painful grasp and giving whoever he'd been talking to the go-ahead. The dingy alley they were in disappeared in another flash of brilliant light, but this time, it didn't hit Rose as hard – or maybe her stomach simply realized it had nothing left to lose.

The space they jumped to this time seemed vaguely familiar to Rose, but she couldn't place it: a vast room with a metal walkway winding up around the brick and concrete sides, jammed with a large collection of machinery, some of it vaguely unEarthly, much of it in various states of disrepair. She waited a moment until her head stopped spinning, then carefully got to her feet, the stranger's hand roughly helping her up.

Then without a word he turned her slightly to face another man, and she caught her breath in unconscious fear. Well over six feet, angular, spring-tight muscles under an expensive tailored black suit, it was his eyes that caught and held her: icy sea-green, they pierced right through her soul.

He let the silence draw out a few seconds before asking, his voice menacingly calm and quiet, "Do you know who I am?"

She didn't need to search her brain; she was quite certain they'd never met. She'd remember instantly if they had. She silently shook her head, unable to look away from his eyes.

"Think back. Do you know a young boy who resembles me? With a birthmark like this?" He raised his left hand and showed her the large, distinctive birthmark there. Her eyes flickered to it and back to his, then shook her head again.

He gave a tight smile that didn't reach his cold eyes. "Good. Then he got you in time. Take her down to the holding cells with the others." This last to the man holding her, as he turned disdainfully away to bend over the console beside him.

Rose finally tore her eyes from his and looked more closely at the console, then the rest of the apparatus immediately around them. Her eyes widened, but she kept her mouth shut as her arm was jerked again to get her moving. This looks like a dimension cannon, but it's not ours. Is this in another parallel? Has someone else invented one? Or... Oh, shit. Is this Jack's lair, in Alpha? Then where's Jack? Her mind kept racing as she was walked down off the platform, through a corridor and down a short flight of stairs. She and Jared had sent Jack Harkness a "superphone" like the one she'd been carrying through their Cannon shortly after their return from Reich World, and he'd said he was beginning to work on a Cannon of his own. This place did seem to resemble the glimpses of his lair at the Cardiff Rift that she'd seen on the TARDIS monitor that awful, glorious day at the Medusa Cascade. But WHEN are we? Where's Jack now?

Then she was thrust through a thick metal door, which clanged shut behind her and the bolt shot home, and all thoughts of the gallant Captain fled, as she stared openmouthed around at six other women already imprisoned there.

Each of whom wore her exact face.

Connections

"Oooookay," Rose slowly exhaled. "Definitely parallel worlds." Some of the six other identical faces exchanged glances at that pronouncement, while one of them perked up and stepped forward.

"Ulva?" she queried.

Rose swung towards her – only in one world had she been called that. She nodded, then gestured back to the speaker, "You're...?"

"Yeah, the Reich." Both women blew out relieved breaths to find one splinter of familiarity in the situation. "Do you know what world we're in?" Reich Rose went on.

"Well, definitely not Beta," Rose replied, thinking it through as she spoke, "because we made two jumps. The first was a time jump, the second was between worlds." Catching the quizzical look on Reich Rose's face, she grimaced. "Experience. There's a slight difference in how it feels. Besides, he controlled the first with a time jumper," motioning to her wrist where it would be, "but had to call home for the second. What about you? How many jumps did it take for you to get here?"

"Two," came the reply with a nod. "So we're not in Reich World, either."

"What about the rest of you," Rose turned towards the other mirror images. "How many jumps did it take for you to get here?"

A confused chorus of "two"s came back from most, but Reich Rose turned to another woman standing to one side with a uncomprehending expression, and reposed the question in slow, basic German, with many gestures pantomiming the experience. Finally the light dawned, and two fingers were held up. Reich Rose turned back to Rose, explaining, "She doesn't speak English. I don't know what language she does speak – it sounds kind of like Welsh – but she also speaks a bit of a kind of German, so we can talk a little bit."

"How long have you been here?" put in Rose. The other woman seemed to have made quite a bit of progress in understanding the situation.

Reich Rose shrugged. "A couple of hours. I was brought in first, then these others one by one." She turned again and gestured to yet another Rose. "Her English is strange, much closer to German, but still English. The rest of us all seem to speak the same."

"And we were all brought across parallels. So we're either in Alpha, or another one entirely." Rose returned to the main question.

"Why Alpha?"

"Because that's where I'm from originally. I'm Alpha's Rose Tyler. There wasn't one in Beta. Besides, I think I know where we are, anyway – and that's definitely in Alpha." The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that they were in Jack's hideaway under Cardiff.

"And you are a very clever girl," came a male voice from the doorway, and all seven heads swiveled in that direction. They hadn't heard the inset window open.

Their captor's face peered through the bars, his ice-green eyes staring at Rose. "So you are the one who should have influenced me? I'm grateful for your absence."

"Excuse me?"

"I've brought you all here because each of you would have had some sort of influence over the parallel versions of myself at some point in your future, influence I do not wish you to have. Now things will progress the way they should have."

"And what are you going to do with us?" Reich Rose demanded.

"I haven't decided yet. Perhaps I'll keep you around for amusement. You'd make a marvelous dance troup. Or a harem..." Corvantes smiled malevolently – and again, Rose noted it didn't reach his eyes.

Suddenly, an odd sound came from behind Corvantes, a dull thud. His eyes glazed over, and he toppled out of sight of the inset window, knocked out by the blow from a blunt object. The holder of that object loomed up instead, grinning cockily through the window.

"Sorry, buddy, but the only one around here allowed to have a harem is me."

"Where the hell have you been?" Rose yelled, but her answering grin betrayed her relief at being rescued, once again, by the one and only Captain Jack Harkness.

^..^

Jared stared in panic at the spot Rose and the stranger had just winked out from for several long moments before snapping out of it. He turned and thundered up the stairs to their flat, flying back down a moment later with his sonic screwdriver, and swept it across the spot under several different settings. None of them told him anything other than it had been a temporal shift – and he realized then that the gizmo on the kidnapper's arm had been a fancy time jumper. However, there was no residual trail his sonic could follow.

"Dammit!" Swearing uncharacteristically – a habit the Doctor had never picked up – he shut the sonic off, then, whistling to Tock, he whirled about and headed at a dead run to the Island and the Torchwood facility hidden beneath it. The dog gave a final, questioning whimper and followed at his master's heels.

Bursting through the doors into the old smuggling tunnel now holding the dimension cannon, Jared abruptly halted, startled to see it empty of people. Where was everyone? Then he remembered – getting ready for his and Rose's wedding! He checked his watch – it was due to start in less than two hours. And it will, he thought grimly, if it takes the rest of my life to find her and bring her back in time.

Reinforcements

Flicking switches and throwing levers with all the mad panic he used to employ at the TARDIS console, Jared brought the dimension cannon online and began searching out Rose's timeline. It wasn't hard to trace – suddenly it seemed that every timeline in their universe was converging on hers. Some stray memory was trying to get his attention, but he furiously batted it away as an unwanted distraction. Widening the view to include the parallel worlds, he then stretched out the time parameter to include the few past years – no sign. Before searching further back, he switched it to the future view. Even with his enhancements, the Cannon could only see about one hundred years into the future, and that increasingly hazy and wildly uncertain at the far end. Hope to high heaven she wasn't taken further up than that. If it couldn't find her, he'd search further back into the past. But then he didn't need to – her timeline's distinctive signature jumped out at him again, about fifty years ahead, and in the Alpha universe. (Stopping to think: had she been at that time and place with the Doctor? No. This was her 'current' whereabouts.) He stared for a moment at the knot of activity represented – Rose's timeline was not only being reinforced somehow, but it seemed everything was bending around her there, too.

Whatever she had been dragged into, it was going to shake the multiverse.

And he wasn't going to let her face it alone.

Even though the Cannon could see far into past and a short way into the future, it couldn't send people or things across time, only to the same time in the parallel worlds. Not to worry, though – he knew how to solve that problem, as well. More correctly, he knew someone who could.

He double-checked the date in question to settle it firmly into his mind, then, setting the Cannon's destination to Alpha Universe, Cardiff, Torchwood Rift Hub, Jared dove through the gate and across the parallels.

With Tock, forgotten and unnoticed, right on his heels, as always.

And in the empty room they left behind, on the eight huge 3D plasma screens, and the myriad smaller displays, the swirls and lines and symbols that represented the worlds and the lives within them began to fade to black.

^..^

Jack Harkness was hip deep in his third favorite activity: tinkering. Specifically, working on the dimension cannon he was trying to develop to the hints and suggestions from Rose and Jared off in Beta World, on the rare occasions when the superphone they'd sent him actually worked. He wasn't sure why he was devoting so much time to the project; he wasn't at all certain he'd ever get it to work. But after spending a few years in America, and a couple of decades traveling elsewhere and elsewhen, something kept drawing him back to this spot. So he'd rebuilt the Hub, refurnishing it with flotsam trawled and conned (his fourth favorite activity) from far corners of the universe which might prove useful someday. The Rift had been quiet these past few years; even the Weevils seemed to have abandoned Earth. Gwen and Rhys popped in occasionally, but the Torchwood action team was only rarely needed these days. Their growing family captured all their attention; and that was just as it should be. Jack would never begrudge a child having his own parents on hand, alive and involved.

Something was wrong with the blasted timeline readouts again. They kept flickering in and out. He ducked his head back into the cabinet and sighed, then laid out flat, reached for a spanner without looking, and began troubleshooting once again. The cabinet doors had never yet been closed; he might as well take them off.

Without warning, a brilliant flash of light from outside the cabinet seared his eyes, while a rolling thunderclap deafened him. Did somebody just set off a lightning grenade in here? Jerking upright, he inevitably koshed himself on the frame, adding some shooting stars to his visual field.

"JACK!" came a familiar yell, and he groaned in reply, rubbing his eyes to attempt to restore his sight. A pair of trainers at once appeared next to his legs, followed by four distinctly canine paws.

"Just shoot me already and get it over with," he continued groaning, "I'll feel better faster."

The owner of the trainers squatted down, and two familiar visages grinned at him in unison. Jack squeezed his eyes shut again, rubbed them harder, and tried again; this time the two melted into a single man. "Doc?" he tried cautiously.

"No. Jared."

"Ah. I was going to say your taste in companions has changed."

Following Jack's tipped head, Jared swung around, only then realizing that Tock had followed him. He frowned. "He's certainly as persistent as some of them, though." Sending a last glare at the unrepentant pooch, he turned back to Jack and gave him a hand up to his feet.

Jack kept his hold, changing it into a handshake while a wide grin split his face. "Damn, it's good to finally see you again, Jared!" Though they'd been talking through the Rift since receiving the superphone from Beta, neither had made the jump to the other world. He looked around expectantly, but was disappointed. "Where's Rose?" That she hadn't come with her fiance seemed impossible.

Jared's answering grin melted away, and his eyes turned steely. "She's been kidnapped, Jack. She was nabbed right in front of me by a goon with a time jumper, and then somehow brought back to Alpha. That's why I'm here. I need your help."

"You got it!" Without a second's hesitation, Jack reached for his Navy greatcoat draped on a nearby chair and slipped his gun into its holster. Then he held up his arm, prepared to punch in coordinates, when a thought hit him. "You aren't going to deactivate this on me again when we're done, are you?"

"No," was Jared's quiet, level reply. "I'm not the Doctor." As if in proof, he picked up the pistol that had lain beside Jack's and slipped it into his pocket.

"No, you're not." Jack agreed, then nodded. "Where and when?"

"Right here, fifty years up." He reeled off the date he'd memorized in Beta.

"Here? In my Hub? Oh, no. Nobody takes over my place AND kidnaps my girlfriend into the bargain!"

^..^

Deciding (for once) to use a tiny bit of caution, the rescue party flashed into the future Hub within the side tunnel leading back to the cold storage vaults. Creeping to the doorway to the Hub proper, they peeked through the crack just in time to see Rose led away to the far side door, "down to the cells" Jack informed Jared in a whisper.

"How many men are out there?" came the growled response, Jared just barely keeping himself from jumping out immediately after his beloved.

"Three here, one with Rose, and..." Jack craned to hear, "a few more over in the 'break room' yonder." He indicated the man now leaning over the machinery on the far side of the Hub. "He looks like the one in charge. Do you recognize him?" Jared shook his head. "Me, neither. Those other two seated look like techs."

"That's all of them then," came from the man in charge. "We'll let things settle for a day, then contact my other selves again tomorrow. In the meantime, I think I'll have a talk with our... guests." He turned to follow after Rose.

Leaving Tock in the tunnel with a fierce whispered exhortation to lie down and be quiet, the two time travelers took the opportunity to slip out of their hiding place and capture the two techs, making sure they weren't armed (they weren't) and then shoving them into the break room. There they used their human Trojan horses to get the drop on the half dozen goons sitting around the table, disarming them, then simply locking the door on the way out.

On the way back across the Hub proper, Jack halted momentarily, as he suddenly took in the mess: his beloved lair had been utterly trashed. Most of the equipment and workstations other than the Cannon itself had actually been smashed at some point; some of them showed signs of repair, at least far enough to tell what they were for, but mostly the shards had simply been added to a huge pile of flotsam against the tall concrete side wall.

Jared reached the door to the cells and realized Jack wasn't behind him. He turned around and gave a sharp Pssst!, jarring Jack out of his mini-trance. "What the HELL happened here?" Jack murmured as he reached his friend; Jared merely shrugged, his mind on more important questions.

They surprised the goon who'd escorted Rose out on his way back up; Jack simply punched him between the eyes before he could make a sound and he slid silently to the floor, Jared shoving him to one side as Jack leapt over him – and relieving him of the time jumper on his wrist, as well. Then he snuck after Jack in time to see him pistol-whip the leader at the cell door.

"Sorry, buddy, but the only one around here allowed to have a harem is me," was Jack's mysterious comment through the window set into the door. Jared started to clear his throat in annoyance, when a precious, familiar voice rang out from beyond it.

"Where the hell have you been?"

Jared whipped out his sonic and whizzed it against the lock, then shoved Jack wordlessly to one side and ripped open the door. Just on the other side...

… stood Rose. She gasped out his name and fell into his arms and he pulled her in and held her so close so tight burying his face in her hair never let you go again never never...

An endless precious moment later, she pulled back to grin tearily up at him. "I knew you'd come after me. Though I admit I didn't expect to see you this quick."

He started to grin back, but then his mind finally began to register what his reopened eyes were telling him from their periphery, and he looked around the bare rock cell in astonishment. One, two... SIX other Roses were staring at him – one grinning, the others agape in mixed hope and bewilderment. He glanced back down at the one in his arms and gulped.

"Well, you've got the right clothes on..." came his invitation for her confirmation.

She giggled, saying "So do you!", obliquely giving him HER method of identifying HIM from his twin: the cutoffs he'd been wearing to the beach. Then she leaned up to whisper in his ear, "We're supposed to be getting married today. If we make it back in time." Suddenly she groaned, her head wilting onto his shoulder. "Oh, crap, Mum is going to MURDER me..."

His grin returned, greatly relieved. "OK. It's you."

Fading Echoes

"Hey, you two, would you mind terribly if we got out of this jail cell?" Reich Rose's amused voice finally broke Jared and Rose apart, and he pulled her out the door then to one side to wave the other girls by. Jack took the opportunity to grab their erstwhile captor and heave him, still unconscious, into the cell in their stead, then Jared sonicked it locked again.

"Why is my gut telling me this is too easy?" Jack muttered to no one in particular, while following the group back up to the main room. There, the two men and seven identical women quickly established Who, When, Where, and Why – what little they knew – before Rose caught the utterly lost expression on the foreign-speaking woman's face.

"Jared, this me doesn't seem to speak English. She does speak a bit of German. Can you figure out what her language is?"

At the sound of his mistress's voice, Tock began barking from the side tunnel. "You didn't bring Tock too, did you?" Rose scolded Jared, glaring at him before she went to open the door and suffer his joyful greeting, then brought him back to the others.

"Oi! Not like I had any choice - he followed me!" Jared called after her, then turned to the Rose she'd indicated and, in basic German, got her to talk to him in her own tongue. Immediately his face lit up, and he began chattering back. "It's a form of Celtic," he informed the others, "closer to modern Welsh than anything, but quite a bit older." He turned back to Celtic Rose, who looked about to cry from relief, and slowly he began explaining the concept of parallel worlds and doppelgangers, with a side of time travel. From her return gestures and his nods, the others guessed that she understood. Finally she speared him with what was obviously a vital question.

"How do you get back home?" he repeated in English, then gestured to the dimension cannon's long console to one side. "With this."

"Jack, is this your Cannon?" Rose teased him with a grin. "I'm impressed."

"Well, don't be impressed with me yet, sweetheart. I recognize the center cabinet there, but that's as far as I've gotten. I don't know if I'm going to build the rest of this or not – and I have no idea right now how to work it."

"We don't have time to mess around with it, Jack. Get one of the techs out here." Rose was already bending over the console, but she looked a little confused.

"What's wrong, love? It's not that different from ours, from what I can see," Jared asked as he joined her.

"I... Jared, I can't see the other parallels here. Just Alpha. No, wait... there..." her finger stabbed at one of the monitors, but then pulled back. "And now it's gone again." She turned to the tech now climbing the short flight of stairs in front of Jack. "What's wrong with this thing? What's not turned on?"

Giving them all a sidelong glance, the tech scurried over to start fiddling. He stopped, stared, then fiddled some more. "Uh... I can't see anything wrong. It's all on. But the parallels are gone."

Jared had whipped out his sonic again, and was giving the beast a thorough buzzing. Finally he clicked it back off again, his eyes huge.

"Jared?" Rose's voice was suddenly a frightened almost-whisper.

"There's nothing wrong with it. The parallels are closed off. Or trying to be. They're fading in and out, just like you saw."

As she looked from his face back to the console, Rose's face turned a few degrees whiter, and her jaw dropped. She'd finally focused in on the patterns that did show, rather than the ones that were missing. "Jared... that's the same pattern we saw before. When all the timelines were centering on Donna, at the Crucible."

He looked again. "But now they're centered on YOU!" He looked askance at his life partner again. "What are you about to do now, Bad Wolf?" His mouth quirked, but then another thought burst through, the one that had been trying to get his attention back at their own Cannon. "I saw that pattern, too, back in Beta, before I jumped here."

The tech had been peering over their shoulders. "That's also the same pattern we saw before, when Corvantes decided to get you girls. He thought it meant you were keeping him from achieving what he wanted, by your influence on his twin in each parallel."

Jared gave the man a sharp glance. "But you didn't think so?"

The tech looked uncertain. He struggled a second, then, "Look, I've only been playing with this thing for a few weeks. I don't know what the patterns mean. I just... I didn't think it was as simple as he thought. He's kind of fixated on himself, you know what I mean?"

Jared gave a long sigh. "Well... until we find out what that does mean, we'll just have to deal with what we do know."

"But that leads us back to the original question. How are we all going to get back home now?" Rose asked, struggling to put aside his Bad Wolf question. Now that it was her in the metaphorical hot seat, she didn't know if she wanted it.

Jared leaned over the console on both fists, staring off into the middle distance for a long, long minute. Only Rose and Jack had any idea of how fast that awesome mind was speeding, considering and discarding innumerable possibilities.

Finally he sighed again, then turned and faced the room, leaning his hips back against the console. "There's only one way I can think of, now." Catching Celtic Rose's eyes, he said to her in her language, "I'll explain this to you next," and she nodded, unhappy but perforce to wait, and he went on in English.

"Think of time as a river," he began. "With a definite flow, and a known channel. Yes, it is known. Jack and I are both from the far future. We know how things are going to turn out at many different times in history. It already has, for us."

Pausing for a moment for that to sink in, he went on. "Now, consider this: a time traveler, like one of us, going back into the past, into a known spot along that river, and doing something different. Something that 'changes history', as it were. What kind of effect would that have? Well, most things that a single individual can do only make very tiny changes. The inertia of time's flow overcomes it easily – like dropping a pebble into a real river. A few ripples, and then it's as if nothing happened. Yes, there are some tiny effects, that impact only a few people, but it doesn't disrupt the entire stream. Things like... people or things disappearing without a trace, or – have you ever gone shopping, and you could have sworn that shop was on this corner, but now it's over there? That could have been a time disruption. A little adjustment."

Again, he paused, then continued. "Now, think about dropping a big boulder in that river. Up to a certain point, time's inertia can still overcome it. The adjustments made after the waves meet again would be much more noticeable – LOTS of people having different memories, major mysterious happenings, but still... life would go on.

"Now imagine a huge disruption. Make a big enough change, something extremely important, with deep ramifications, and time's inertia can't overcome it. Then... the time stream actually splits. Before that point, you have one world, one timeline. After that point, two."

"Or eight?" asked Rose, jumping ahead. "Is that why there are eight parallel worlds here that we've been watching?"

Jared nodded. "I've been studying them through our Cannon, in our world," he told the others. "I've traced them all back, and can tell you almost precisely when each one split off of this one, that we're standing in now. It really is the Alpha world – the first world."

"So what does that get us?" asked one of the other Roses.

"Well..." Uncharacteristically, Jared hesitated briefly, then forged ahead. "It means the only way I can think of to get you each back to your world is to use the time jumpers they used to bring you here to send you back to the point at which your timeline split off from this one. And you'll have to make the change yourself. I know that each point – what I used to think were Fixed Points," he said in an aside to Jack, "are actually major historical turning points, that could be – and were – affected by one person. If you go back and make it happen, then you'll ride the split away from us, and be back in your own timeline again. Then all you have to do is use the time jumper again to jump back to your own time - I can pre-program them for you – and you'll be home."

Dead silence reigned while that was digested. Then, "Wait a minute!" cried one Rose. "If we do that, then aren't we MAKING the split ourselves? Making our own world, back in history? How can we do that? How can I go back and create the world I came from, back before I was even born? If I don't make it, I won't even BE born TO make it!"

Jared grinned at her. "Rose... my people were Time Lords. They studied time for thousands of years. And even they never figured out the answer to that paradox. Don't try to figure it out yourself; you'll only drive yourself insane. Just take it on faith."

"That's a hell of a lot to ask," she replied evenly.

His grin dribbled away. "Yes, I know it is. And I don't know what assurances I can offer you to trust me."

His Rose spoke up, addressing her doppelgangers. "How about this: I'm you. I'm as much you as I can be without being in your skin. And I traveled with this man for years, all through time and space, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's telling you the truth. I trust him – have trusted him, on many occasions – with my life, my sanity, my family, and my worlds. Both of them."

Jared knew he was staring at her, but couldn't help it. Her words from that long ago night on Reich World, as she was reeling from the Doctor's cruel abandonment, echoed from his memory: "How can I believe you? If you're him... how can I trust you?" He'd asked her to wait until he'd earned her trust again. And she had.

Some psychic echo of his churning thoughts might have brushed against her mind, because she turned her head and looked straight back at him... and smiled shyly, reaching for and taking his hand. Nobody else knew the significance of their entwined fingers, but they did. A mutual squeeze, and they turned back to face the others together.

"And what if we don't do it, whatever it is?" Reich Rose asked quietly. "What if we fail? Or refuse?"

"Then your world won't exist. And everyone you ever knew will never have been born. An entire world full of people, from the date of the split."

"And what about us, then? Me? What if I fail?" another asked the obvious corollary.

Jared thought for a moment, then sadly shrugged. "I don't know, Rose. I honestly don't know. You might... fade out, like the parallels here are trying to do, like your world will. Or you might continue to exist in this world, but be stuck here forever. I just don't know."

"Couldn't we try again?"

He shook his head firmly at that. "No. You're only going to get one shot. You CANNOT keep going back to the same time and place. Trust me on that." His Rose was nodding vigorous agreement, and the look on her face convinced the others.

"But then we can get back to our own times, our own lives, after that, right?" Another asked.

Jared nodded again. "I'll set the time jumpers up to signal you when the split has been made and you're in your own timeline, and like I said, I'll pre-set it to take you to the same day you were kidnapped. You'll just step back in to your life." Remembering, he took the time jumper he'd relieved the goon of, and asked the tech, "Where are the others?"

The tech nodded to a box at one end of the Cannon console, and Jared saw it contained several of the bulky wristwatches. He was just about to toss his in, as well, when something about it caught his eye, and he looked closer, frowning. "Where did you get these?"

The tech shrugged, then waved a vague hand across the room. "In that box, but over there, in that pile of trash."

"What is it, Jared?" Jack put in.

"I don't know. Something's strange about this. Are they yours?"Jack shook his head. "Have you ever seen this make before?" They were quite different from the leather strapped Jumper that Jack wore,

with straps of tiny silver links like chain metal and a fancy clasp.

Jack took the Jumper from Jared, and looked it over for a moment, then shook his head again. "I don't recognize them, but they seem standard from what I can see."

Another pause, then Jared shrugged. "Well, they obviously work." So he motioned Jack to toss that one in the box with its fellows, and turned back again to the girls.

Alpha Rose asked, "How can you get them to sense – and show – when the timestream has split?" Jack's time jumper had always fascinated her, even though she'd never seen it before; how could someone pack what a TARDIS did inside a wristwatch-sized gadget?

"The most obvious difference between the universes, the one the Cannon homes in on, is in the base harmonic frequencies, that reflect and control the passage of time as well. Each one that splits off goes infinitessimally faster. The backlight on the display is easiest to control; I'll set it to change color with the frequencies, going up the spectrum of visible light."

"Like a rainbow," she mused, and he nodded.

A few moment's silence, and Jack, sensing the tide turning, asked his friend, "Jared, are you sure you know each point?"

"As close as I could determine them from the other world, Jack – " he started to answer.

"Wait a minute. Wait. A. Minute," broke in the tech. His expression was almost frightened. "What are your names again?" He pointed back and forth between the two men.

Jack stared, perplexed. "Why? Weren't we properly introduced? I'm Jack Harkness, and he's Jared Wolfe. And you are?" he turned it back, sarcastically polite.

"Joel Johnson?" the tech squeaked.

Jack smirked, saying aside to Jared, "There's too many J's in this room."

This time, Joel's jaw dropped completely open, catching their eyes again. "OK," he finally said, giving in. "I'm in waaaaay over my head." He turned to the Cannon console and opened a door at the far end, kneeling down and digging deep into the innards. Pulling out a dusty, greasy package, he walked back and handed it to Jared with an expectant air.

Bemused, Jared took it, and read aloud the message scrawled on the brown wrapper. "Joel: give this to Jared. From Jack. There's too many J's in this room." Eyebrows flaring, he looked his question at Jack, who shrugged.

"Beats me," he replied. "Whatever that is, I haven't done it yet."

Jared tore open the package, catching the half-dozen paperback books that fell out. Then he glanced at the titles on their spines and laughed. "History books. Just the right ones, too: one for each split point."

"So now we've got road maps," Jack laughed back.

Jared nodded, then turned to look at each potential world-changer. "Well?" he challenged.

A pause, and then one stepped forward. "Are you sure we can do this? Whatever it is?"

He looked straight back at her, and said significantly, reassuringly, with that knowing smile that only he could produce, "It's history, Rose. Your history. You already have."