A/N: This is just a short little bit of something that was bugging me to get written: Eight taking a break from the war and looking for something ... anything ... to give him the strength to keep fighting. He finds what he needs in a quint little park on a parallel world...

I absolutely love the idea of Eight and Rose together ... there just aren't enough fics out there with the two of them in it. (Hint hint and nudge nudge to all the fanfic writers out there. We need more Eight/Rose stuff!)

Oh, this is a baby!Fic .. just in case you don't get into that kind've thing...

Yeah and to add the typical Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who or any of the recognsable characters. I'm just borrowing them for a bit to tell my own tale...

~~oooOOOooo~~

Hot yellow sparks and superheated melting plastic rained from the ceiling above his head, but it didn't stop the Doctor from fighting against the protests of his ship. The central column whined and screamed her objections to his flight commands, but it wasn't enough to convince her pilot that what he was doing was wrong. She was willing to destroy her entire console room to make him see reason, but there was no way that he was going to listen. She glowed with pulsing mauve lighting and splashed swirling circular words of warning across her monitors begging him to please stop…

"I know it hurts, my faithful friend," he empathized as gently as he could through gritted teeth of exertion. "But please stop fighting this. I promise you that I will make it up to you."

To suggest that it hurt was an incredible understatement. He was piloting her though a near impermeable telepathic wall. It was bad enough that the Doctor was insisting that they break through the tentatively holding Quantam Force Field that surrounded Gallifrey, but now he had her fighting through the Transduction Barrier as well. Traffic Control were under instruction to disallow any unauthorized capsule flight requests – no exceptions – and were therefore strengthening the shields.

Gallifrey was at war. The War Council had recalled every Capsule across all of time and space. It wouldn't matter where in the universe her pilot tried to take her, the Absolute Tesseractulator would tell Traffic Control where they were and they would use that information to override her systems to recall them.

If he was going to insist that they run like cowards, then she'd make sure they ended up where the long arms of Gallifrey couldn't reach them.

Her entire structure shuddered, but the raining sparks and screaming stopped. In its place was a long and loud whine from the central column as the console room shuddered, and then pitched and bucked violently to one side. She was unapologetic as the Doctor was thrown to the floor in an undistinguished moaning pile of silk and thick velvet, but let out a trembling sigh as the pitching and bucking finally stopped.

The Doctor lifted his head tiredly to look at the now silent central column of his beloved ship with an expression of concern. The lack of movement in the split razor components within the shaft told him that they'd landed.

"I didn't give you any materialization coordinates," he said cautiously as he tenderly drew himself to a stand and walked in toward the main console. "Wherever you've landed us, it isn't where I wanted to go."

"No, my Thief," she whispered telepathically into his mind. "But this is where you need to be."