It's not the sequel to Effigermus, but it's something in the meantime. I woke up at 6am from a dream. This is the result.

This is for WhoMe-2. You can persevere!

Summary: TenRose Reunion, two parts. After the death of the part-human Doctor, Rose's despair reaches across dimensions. The Tenth Doctor and Rose risk everything to get back to each other.

PART ONE

A tiny blue police box floated adrift in the vacuum of cold, deep space, it's windows dark.

The Doctor was suddenly wracked with desperate gasps for air. At first, there was nothing but confusion and an instinctive effort to pull in breaths, the sound of it loud in his ears, the only sound. Pain and searing images of his own screaming blinded his eyes as he clung to the console, the TARDIS hurtling not in space, not even in time, but sideways through dimensions. Through the Void.

After several successful breaths, the Doctor became aware of his surroundings. He was on the floor, the grating of the console room; he could feel its icy texture under his scrabbling fingers, hear its metallic echo as his elbow slammed into it. Everything, everything was dark. All he could see was a few pricks of light outside the windows way over at the door and the faint wash of starlight on the inner shell of the cavernous room.

The images having faded, he could now recognise them as recent memories. He sat himself up in the lonely darkness as reality filtered back to him, his throat completely parched. He had made it through the Void. Somehow, it hadn't killed him.

Or maybe it had.

A numbed palm gripped his chest in an attempt to identify himself. Still slight in frame. He felt for his face and confirmed it was still his. He hadn't regenerated. Or had he?

The Doctor forced his dry tongue between his lips, desperate for water, but he looked to the console instead. There was no life in the rotor, not a hint of it. He looked down through the grating. Nothing, nothing at all. Nothing.

Crossing the Void had killed the TARDIS.

Of course it had. He hadn't up any shielding at all. What else could happen, going through what some would call Hell itself? Still, he wouldn't have attempted it if there had been no chance for him to survive. But if the TARDIS hadn't made it through, how had he?

He looked again to the windows. Stars. He wasn't in the Void. He had crossed through, but it had cost the TARDIS her life.

There hadn't been a choice. The ability to travel between dimensions properly was lost with the Time Lords. If he had attempted to cross through with any shielding, he would have destroyed two universes in an all-consuming implosion of space's very fabric. But this, flinging himself unprotected, his comparatively fragile self and ship into a dimensional wall should have killed him. Falling through an atmosphere like Earth's and landing on the ground would kill anyone. Except the miraculous few that walked away.

He should be dead.

The Doctor turned and began to crawl, both towards the door and mentally out of his misery and towards his second chance until he could get his feet under him. He pulled himself up by the ramp's railing, but he overbalanced and fell into the door. Groaning, he stood as well as he could and peered through the windows.

Normally, they were opaque to keep prying eyes out of his business when he landed places. Honestly, he had done it long ago when slogging through the existential programming and couldn't even remember now how to make them transparent again. If he ever wanted to look out, he just opened the door and boldly stepped out to greet his fate. It seemed the TARDIS had done it on her own now, however, and he was glad for it. He dare not step out now, not without power to the plasmic shell to keep the dimensional gateway intact.

All he could see was deep space. The TARDIS was rotating slowly, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

As he watched the starfield in hopelessness, his respiratory rate increased as painful memories of before began to overwhelm him. Despair, such agonising despair! Rose, crying out, her Doctor dead. The metacrisis had failed. It wasn't supposed to happen to his part-human clone like it had Donna. He had been Time Lord, he should have survived! With his mind, he was supposed to be able to take it. But in the end, his double had been the same as Donna, and neither could survive the state in between.

Rose was alone now. That wasn't supposed to happen! The Doctor never would have left her alone in another dimension willingly. It was hard enough pushing her away with him, telling her to live a happy life and sacrifice his own happiness in the process. The curse of the Time Lords. He had to go on. Alone. Not her.

Damn Time and Space. Damn his calling to save the Universe over and over and over. He had hurt so many, left so much collateral damage in his wake, and he had carried on through it all, as one does. He hurt everyone, but that was his life. From his friends, acquaintances, even enemies, he could take it.

But not her. Oh, not her. The hardest thing he had ever done, next to destroying his entire race, was leave Rose. His self-inflicted genocide had almost destroyed him, but she had saved him from that. He couldn't take that kind of pain again. His only solace had been to leave him with her and tell her to have a happy life, the adventure he never could have, and he thought that would be enough.

Feeling her pain at the loss of him was the end. He didn't care about the Universe anymore. It could fend for itself. He didn't want to exist any longer.

Unless he could get to her. The chances he could die crossing to her dimension were astronomically high. He hadn't a choice, though, either get to her or die trying. He would do this for himself, all or nothing. Nothing else mattered to him. Crossing dimensions unshielded should have destroyed everything organic within the TARDIS, including himself, but here he was.

Something outside caught his eye as the ship continued to rotate. The Doctor strained against the door to change his perspective. He croaked out in disbelief as he recognised Far Comm Three, the tiny space outpost. He had made it! All was not lost, not yet. Quickly formulating a plan, he stumbled out of the console room, guided only by emergency lighting along the corridor edges. He was so dehydrated, he couldn't believe he was conscious. How long had he been lying there on the floor?

He reached the kitchen. Fumbling with the lever, he switched the tap on. The water pressure was all wrong, but he cupped his hands and drank what spat out. Immediate relief washed through him, soothing his throat as his tissues quickly absorbed what was needed. Even though his body craved rest, there was no time. He had to go.

-^^-W-^^-

Minutes later, the Doctor emerged into the dark and eerily quiet console room, fastening his helmet clasps securely to his space suit. He made it to the door quickly and checked the rotation. Far Comm Three was almost straight out, but not quite. He had to be careful and do this right the first time. There were no second chances in this.

The doors wouldn't open inward, not with the difference in pressure. Grasping one of the roundels on the wall next to the door, the Doctor twisted and pulled until it came free. He dropped the cover and worked his gloved fingers carefully around the emergency ejection handle. Training his eyes straight ahead on the outpost, he waited, fidgeting with his other hand making sure everything on his suit was in place.

This was it. The time was now. Sucking in a breath and pulling his head back against his helmet, the Doctor pulled.

An explosive sound reverberated through the wall from above and below the doors, and both doors immediately swung outward. It felt like a huge hammer slammed into his back, his feet losing purchase on the floor and the room falling away behind him as the TARDIS interior pressure blew out into space and shot him straight at the outpost.

So far so good! He felt a painful sting at the loss of his ship and wished he could look behind him. He imagined it would look very small, even as the tiny outpost in front of him loomed larger and larger and he became weightless.

He wasn't sure how Rose had called to him from across dimensions. It seemed so impossible that he at first considered he was going mad and inventing the entire experience. He could reach her, yes, but how had he felt her?

The more he had thought about it afterwards, he acquiesced that Rose herself was a gloriously impossible thing, and he had decided to appreciate the gift of actually being able to hear her and try his best to communicate. The first place that came to mind, some place close to a sealed crack between worlds she could get to, was Far Comm Three.

There were so many uncertainties, however. He knew the outpost existed in this parallel—he had seen it when studying the boundaries from the last time he was here—but did a route for Rose to get to it exist? He hadn't time to tell her how, but Rose was brilliant and would find a way. She had acknowledged his instructions of where and when, but the biggest uncertainty of all was, of course, whether he would survive the trip. After all her efforts, the Doctor was more than likely to not make the rendezvous point.

But here he was. If he could survive the impossible and make it this far, certainly she could, too. Several endless minutes of falling through space passed, and the Doctor studied the structure in front of him as he drew close. It was so quiet, no sign of activity. The radar aerials weren't spinning. The windows weren't giving off as much light as he assumed they should. He wondered if the generators were even running. He couldn't hear if they were, of course, through the vacuum of space anyway.

From so far away, he hadn't judged his trajectory quite right. That was okay since his suit had a minor propulsion system. The tiny jets steered him on course, and the Doctor was soon magentising his boots and maneuvering his feet in front of him. Once he was sure he wasn't going to bounce off and was stuck to the surface, the Doctor let out a breath of relief, straightened, and walked carefully towards the nearest hatch.

The Doctor's fears were confirmed when the door didn't open. He struggled with the manual release and climbed inside. Had Rose found the place abandoned and was waiting somewhere else? Or worse, had something happened while she was inside?

The gravity was offline, the corridors deserted and lit only minimally. His atmospheric sensor on his suit registered critically low oxygen levels. Walking in magnetised boots was excruciatingly slow, however it didn't take long for the Doctor to reach the control deck, the place he was most likely to find anyone. He pried open the door and looked inside. The large windows afforded a panorama of space. Below them was a long bank of offline control consoles.

A portable heater glowed brightly, casting its light on the nearest chair. The Doctor's hearts seized in his chest when he recognised Rose's reclined form.

"Rose!" The Doctor broke the seal of his boots with the floor and pushed off the wall. She's not dead, she's not dead, he repeated to himself desperately, and called her name again, but there was no response. He sailed over a discarded space suit lying a few feet away right before he collided with the computer desk opposite the heater next to her. Grabbing hold, the Doctor planted his feet back on the floor and twisted until he could see Rose through his helmet. She was strapped around the hips to the chair, her head to the side and her eyes closed. Just the sight of his beautiful Rose brought him joy, which at once warred with the irony of a series of unlikely events leading them finally back together only to find her like this.

He reached around his suit until he found the spare respirator and pulled, extending it towards her mouth while he positioned her head with his other gloved hand. Tilting her head up and holding the mask in place, the Doctor looked down her body, looking for any signs of injury. He didn't see any, but he didn't see her chest rising at all, either. She had oxygen, but she wasn't breathing it in.

The Doctor cursed into his helmet while simultaneously struggling to pull it off. It bounced off the floor and floated away as he picked up the mask from his suit and breathed it in. He willed his respiratory bypass system to keep his lungs from absorbing oxygen, but he knew it couldn't work that way. Holding the breath in, the Doctor tilted Rose's head again and made a seal around her cold mouth with his lips. As he expelled, forcing the oxygenated air into her lungs, the image of his part-human clone kissing Rose properly on that damned beach came to mind. The Doctor had so envied him then. That man was dead now, though, and fate continued to mock him now, as the kiss of life was hardly what he was hoping for.

Nothing happened.

"No, no, no." His gloves were too thick to feel anything, so the Doctor pressed his cheek against Rose's chest. He could hear the beating of her heart, too slow but there. She just needed more oxygen. Pulling a breath from the mask again, he breathed into Rose again, then again. He continued in this way for what had to be minutes before the Doctor began to panic.

"Come on, Rose!" he urged, the pitch of his voice betraying him. "It's me, see? I'm here! I made it!" He continued to respirate her, offering her soothing words and nonsense, simultaneously running through his mind what could be wrong with her. Was she too cold, despite the heater next to her? Had she been too long without enough oxygen?

Finally he stopped and pressed the side of his face to her chest again. He was very still, but he couldn't hear anything. "No," he whispered. The Doctor repositioned his head and listened again, but there was still nothing. "No! Not now! Rose, stay with me!" He began to tremble, almost paralysed by fear. Turning his head a moment to look into her face, he then buried his face in her neck, straining to feel something, anything.

Nothing.

The Doctor drew back, determined not to give up. He couldn't, not now. Not after all this. He placed his palm carefully over her breastbone. Keeping his eyes trained on the spot, he lifted his hand and slowly twisted his body as he took in a deep breath of the useless air. Expelling sharply and curling his lip in determination, he swung down hard, connecting a blow straight to her heart.

It was instant, startling and fantastic all at once. Rose curled forward, her eyes open wide, her mouth agape. It took a moment to register what was happening, and the Doctor laughed in amazement. He then realised she wasn't actually breathing, as if he had reset her heart and simultaneously knocked the wind out of her. Grabbing the mask, he brought it to her mouth. Rose clutched at the hand over the mask, and finally, she took in a deep, shuddering breath.

"There you go!" the Doctor laughed out, not quite believing she had come around. Hope surged back through him in full force. His knees became suddenly weak; he would have collapsed in his relief had there been gravity, but only needed to catch himself against the chair to compensate.

Rose's eyes darted around in confusion, and after several deep breaths, he could feel her grip on the mask strengthen considerably, and her gaze locked with his.

The Doctor's lips drew back slowly in a mad grin of unbelievable happiness. "Hello."

The corners of Rose's mouth escaped the mask on either side, but quickly disappeared as her eyebrows drew taut and she sobbed into her mask. One arm came up towards him, and the Doctor quickly obliged, dropping down to soothe her in a hug.

"Oh, shh-shh-shh, I'm here. I'm here. It's impossible, but I'm here!"

Rose was only able to lift the mask a little ways in his embrace, but he could hear her clearly. "Impossible is what we do, yeah?"

The Doctor found himself giggling, unable to stop as the joy of hearing her voice penetrated into his very soul. He finally began to feel lightheaded, and rose up to take her mask from her. "Here, give me some of that."

Rose grimaced as he took in a breath for himself, putting a hand to her chest.. "God, I feel like I've been kicked."

He snorted into the mask and pulled it away to speak. "Yeah, sorry about that." When she gave him an odd look, he hesitated a moment at the sobering experience and clarified brokenly, "Your heart stopped."

Rose stared at him before finally turning her head, searching the stars. "Why did you wait out there so long? I couldn't tell for sure if the TARDIS was okay or not, and wondered if you were hurt."

He gave the mask back to her. It hurt enough knowing his ship's fate. He couldn't bear to upset her, not now. The Doctor cleared his throat, avoiding her eyes as he looked around. "Where's everyone else? Why's the power down? You obviously didn't find it like this, otherwise you'd still have a ship here."

"It's just me. Apparently they stopped using this place some time ago, but my ride was willing to drop me off. I saw no reason for them to stay once I flipped the on switch." Seemingly not affected by the Doctor's misdirection, he chanced looking at her as she went on. "Supposedly it's self-sustaining. They said they'd come back in a few days if I asked them to." She took a breath before handing the mask back then looked outside. "I sat and waited until the time you said you'd come, watching. Suddenly there was this flash of light in space and this ring came out of it, like a wave. It hit the outpost, a few panels exploded, and the power went out. I tried to get something to turn on, anything at all, but nothing, it's all fried." She pointed at the heating unit. "Found this in a cupboard, though, and dragged it out. No idea how long it would last, though.

The Doctor closed his eyes briefly, then passed Rose the mask. "TARDIS entry. Apparently it created an EMP. How long has it been since then?"

Rose frowned at him. "About...three days?" She squinted shrewdly. "Why don't you know? Were you hurt?"

The Doctor's mouth fell open. "Three days? There we are, then. I just woke up."

Her eyes widened, round and shining. "But you're okay now, yeah?

The Doctor gazed into her eyes and smiled tenderly. "Oh, yes." He was rewarded when a smile of her own lit up her face in response. Rose then began to sit up, unfastening the strap holding her to the chair. His hands quickly went to steady her, and he bit back an objection when he saw her moving carefully and a bit stiffly. She groaned and slowly swung her legs over, holding onto the edge. Sensing her need, the Doctor brought the mask to her mouth, and she took several deep breaths.

Rose moved her face away from the mask a moment. "So, what's the plan? We head for the TARDIS now? I hope you didn't land her very far." The Doctor's eyes fell away, and he looked towards the door, decidedly away from her, and she grew concerned. "Doctor? What's wrong? The TARDIS is here, isn't she?"

He swallowed uncomfortably and forced himself to meet her eyes. "I don't know that it would matter if she was. Rose, I...there's nothing I could do. She's perished."

Rose just stared at him, not quite believing it. "Wh-what? But...how?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Crossing through to this dimension with no shielding, it was understandably too much for her. It had to be that way. I shouldn't even be alive. Protected me, probably, but couldn't save herself." He sighed deeply of the useless gases before taking the mask. "I'm sorry."

"But," she protested, her eyes darting in thought. "Back when we first ended up here, back with the Cybermen. You said she died then, too." The Doctor began shaking his head, but she kept on. "You fixed it then, you can just do it again, yeah?"

"There was something then, something of the TARDIS still alive, but not now. Anything from this universe is the wrong kind of power, isn't compatible with the systems. And we can't get back to the other universe to get more." Rose frowned again in thought, then suddenly she was rising to her feet. "Woah, where do you think you're going?"

Rose took the Doctor's mask, pulled in one last deep breath, then turned to look at her discarded space suit lying magnetised to the floor a few feet away. She then pushed off gently from the chair and landed next to it, holding onto it and searching one of the pockets. Rose pulled out a squash-sized object and showed it to him. "This wouldn't work, would it?"

He had stood watching her in confusion, but when it registered what the Doctor was looking at, he gaped in amazement. "Coral," he breathed. Then suddenly he was shouting. "TARDIS coral!" He launched himself off, landing in front of her and sweeping up the tan-coloured chunk in one smooth movement. "Hah! I'd forgotten I'd given you this! Native RNA, transdimensional power of life, perfect! Rose, this is all we need!"

When the Doctor stumbled to one side, Rose laughed and caught the mask dangling from his suit, taking a breath for herself before offering it to him. "You've also forgotten to breathe. See? You always work it out."

The Doctor shook his head and lowered the mask. "Not this, Rose, oh no. You worked this one out." He beamed, shining in his pride and adoration. "My clever, clever Rose."

Rose smiled back, and before she knew what was happening, the Doctor had let go of the mask and curled his fingers behind her head and now he was kissing her, and it was rapture and solace and passion and gloriously fantastic.

All too soon, Rose pushed him away, gasping partly in excitement but mostly for oxygen. As she looked down for the mask, she started in surprise. "Um, Doctor..."

He only had eyes for her, dark and focused on her mouth. "Hm?"

Before slipping the mask over her mouth and breaking his point of focus, Rose softly informed him, "We're floating."

The Doctor glanced down, barked a laugh of surprise, then began giggling again, hugging Rose in mid-air. "I suppose there's a euphemism in here somewhere." Rose hugged him back, sighing into the mask, and simply enjoyed the Doctor's embrace, happy and content and finding him quite comfortable in zero gravity. Before she could get used to it, though, he drew back and looked into her eyes, the passion in them now shifted into another direction. "Get your breath and go for your suit. I'm going for my helmet, which is over..." he craned his neck around, "...by the broom cupboard. Ready?" Rose breathed deeply of the mask, then nodded. He shoved her downwards by the shoulders. "Go!"