Author's notes: well, here it is. The final chapter. It took me a while to post this, because I wanted to revise the previous chapters first. They're all newly edited and re-uploaded.

My heartfelt thanks goes to my beta reader Starsky's Strut, whose dedication to beta this story knew no boundaries. I'm deeply indebted to her. All remaining mistakes are mine.

Last but not least I need to thank all of you. When I started this story I had not anticipated so many readers liking this. I wrote it because, well, because of my love for the show of course, but also because there are precious few Doc Whump stories out there. Who knows, maybe I will do another one someday. But for now a 'Stargate Atlantis' story is next, and I'm going to sit back, relax and enjoy the next season of Doctor Who starting in April.

Thanks for sticking with me. I hope you enjoyed the ride.

EDIT: I made a few changes due to Driessen's excellent point made in the reviews.

Chapter 15

Even though her dad had died early, her life had never been a lonely one. There was her mom, who'd tried so hard to compensate for her father's absence. There were her friends at school, and at gymnastics, and later there were Shareen and Micky. They'd provided a solid safety net, always there when she fell, got dumped by her first boyfriend, or quit her education and took a job instead.

Standing in front of the fountain, she wasn't prepared for that dreadful feeling of loss and uncertainty to attack her again. Like it had when the Doctor had first regenerated. But even then, she'd had her family, ready to catch her, giving her back the strength she needed.

Joe, Costa and Remy moved in and Rose couldn't help but feel utterly alone. The unfamiliar surroundings only succeeded in raising her anxiety up a notch. She stood and shivered in the gusts of wind breezing over the cobble stoned square and playing with the occasional leaf dropped from the heavy flower laden balconies.

Behind her the Doctor's struggle for breath became harder, his life fading, slipping through her fingers. The last of the Time Lords, a legendary race of people would simply pass away, erased from existence as he lay on a bench in some out of the way place of Europe that nobody had ever heard of. His chest would stop rising and falling, and his skin would grow cold like the life she'd had before she'd met him.

All to save her.

Rose blinked, cursing the weakness inside her: an agony she didn't want to register yet. But the fear was there. There was no one to catch her now. She'd given up so much just to be with him and remembered Sarah Jane's words as clearly as if the woman stood in front of her. Some things are worth getting your heart broken for. She agreed, she still did. But that didn't prepare her for the heart wrenching emptiness, for feeling solid ground swept from under her until she tumbled into the dark pit of hell in which enemies closed in as she tried to defend the shadowing life behind her.

Her fingers balled to a fist. She loved him, she'd always known that and never regretted her decision to stay with him. Involuntarily taking a step back, Rose heard her voice crack as she shouted a desperate warning. "Stay where you are! Don't come near 'im, you hear!" It sounded pathetic, small and powerless. A last attempt to save what was already lost.

To her surprise the three men stopped.

Her teeth clattered, her heart raced with adrenaline as Remy stepped forward. She felt like a lioness protecting her cubs. Although she was sure the Doctor wouldn't thank her for comparing him to a cat, even if it was a small one. The humorous thought shattered on the bitterness of the situation before it could make her laugh. She pursed her lips tightly together, the muscles in her face hurting with the effort. "Stop right there!" She cried again, keeping the tears from her voice.

"Rose, we're not here to hurt you," Remy spoke. He sounded tired.

"No, you're here to hurt him. You and your 'friends.' She waved at Costa and Joe. Having felt more grief in these last couple of days than she had in her lifetime, exhaustion caused her to waver on her feet and she took another step back. Michelle caught her arm, but Rose shrugged lose, she couldn't afford to look like a weak school girl right now.

"The Doctor did something to the generator," Joe pitched in. "We need him to fix it."

"Fix it?" Rose repeated. "Make everything all right like he always does?" She couldn't help a grieved sob from escaping. "He's dying from… from what you did to him," she glared at Remy, who seemed to shrivel beneath her accusation. Her voice softened at the guilt in his eyes. She was never an eye for an eye kind of girl. "An' even if he could. Why would he want to fix the thing that's causing him to lose his life?"

"Because," Joe stepped forward next to Remy. "when it blows, it's going to take half of this continent with it."

Rose's eyes widened as she tried to grasp what Mason was telling her.

"He created some sort of overload," Joe continued. "one only he can stop." He took another step toward her. Rose, trembling on her feet, stubbornly staying put. Joe tried to glance past her at the figure on bench, then his eyes locked on her again. He took a deep breath. "He's too smart not to know what he was doing. He set us up, Rose. He knew we would have to come looking for him, knew we would have to give him his ship back, in order to stop the feedback loop in the generator."

The implication of his words had her gob smacked for a moment. A contingency plan? She almost whipped around to glare at her silent friend, not knowing whether she felt angry, hurt or relieved. You planned all this! It certainly sounded like him. He wasn't the kind of guy to roll over and die, not if he had anything to say about it. And God knew he'd wriggled himself out of potential deadly situations before. "You have to save the Doctor? If you want him to save you. Is that what you're sayin'?"

Remy showed the ghost of a smile. "Quite clever, Non?"

A hiccupping breath caught her attention and this time, Rose turned around and was on her knees in no time. The Doctor's ragged breathing halted beneath the touch of her hands. She felt his heart beats slow beneath her fingers. "Doctor! Come on. Just a second longer. I'll get you to the TARDIS. You just hang on, you hear?" Her voice fell quiet as his muscles suddenly spasmed and his whole body started to shake violently. Even unconscious, he still fought death as hard as when he was full of life. She grabbed his trembling arms, holding them down to keep him from falling off the bench. A tear ran down her cheek, more followed, accumulating into a waterfall when she realized these were his final struggles. "We're too late," she whispered through a thick throat. "The TARDIS…. It's too far away. It's…"

"Right around the corner," Costa supplied.

It took a moment for the words to register. She looked over her shoulder. "What?"

"Your ship," Remy explained. "Costa here picked it up from the fields. It's sitting on a Lorry, just over there." He waved at a side street.

Not wasting time at their sudden change of luck, Rose draped a limb around her shoulders. They had a chance… albeit small, but perhaps it was all the Doctor needed. "Remy, help me, pick him up!" She ordered, figuring the vine yard owner knew all about the ship anyway. She glared at the men, daring them to follow her and her precious cargo.

"Don not worry, Rose," Michelle spoke, startling her. She 'd forgotten the French woman still stood at her side. "I will make sure they stay where they are."

"You and what army?" Costa growled.

Joe quickly stepped in front of the Spaniard. "We'll keep away from the ship, but you have to hurry, Rose. The generator could go at any moment."

"Just give 'im a chance to live first, okay?"

The Doctor's trembles had stopped, and he'd gone limp. His sudden stillness increased her worry ten fold, tightening her chest until the tension seemed to tear her lungs apart. Bile rose up in her throat but she couldn't stop to check his breathing, his heartbeats, whether or not he was still alive.

All she could do was hope that the Doctor would hang on for just a minute longer, that the TARDIS would perform a miracle and that they would all live happily ever after.

"Theta. Theta!"

The Doctor blinked, not sure if someone called him. He turned to find Firenni leaning against a tree -his TARDIS, the Doctor noticed- looking as healthy as ever. Wind played with blond bangs above amused eyes full of life.

"I haven't been called by that name in a long, long time." He looked around, but all he saw was forest and more forest. It felt peaceful. He glared at his friend. "Where am I?"

"Oh, you know, here and there. You touched me when I died. So you could say I'm just an image etched into your mind."

Looking up, the Doctor gazed at the clear blue sky. For the first time since the destruction of Gallifrey he felt truly at ease. The feeling of quilt and grief, of trying so hard to move on after having lost everything, had vanished.

He eyed the apparition, for that's what he stubbornly called it for now, suspiciously. "I'm not dead, am I?"

Firenni laughed, shaking his head. "No, not yet, but you're close."

The Doctor nodded, weariness clouding his heart. "I'm tired, Firen. Tired of going on and on and on. All that fighting and for what?"

"You know the answer to that, Theta. Even now you still want to live."

Burrowing his hands in his trouser pockets, the Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Are you saying I have a choice?"

"If you say so. I'm not going to lie to you. It's going to get tougher. If you do this, the road ahead won't be any less lonely than it was in the past."

"You mean I'll lose Rose?"

Firenni gave a sad smile. "You know as well as I do that the future isn't written yet. We're Time Lords, Theta. We have a certain amount of … say in the matter."

"You're not real."

"No. So, what's it going to be… Doctor?"

He grinned widely.

The Doctor stood with trembling fingers at the TARDIS' console. He was still shaking, still not a hundred percent, but he was healing. Waking up in the ship's infirmary, seeing Rose relieved features, he couldn't tell her how much this lousy trip to France had unsettled him. So, he'd fallen back on his usual perky self.

"What's happened to her?" Rose stood quietly a ways of on the raised platform, looking more lost than ever. Even the TARDIS had trouble keeping her engines going. Her mechanical wheeze sounded strained, painful even, reflecting the Doctor's inner struggle to stay up on his feet.

He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs clouding his mind. He didn't remember much of the last hour. There was this dream, but the images were as illusive as butterflies, fluttering away like smoke in the wind. "She'll be all right." He pulled a lever and rigged the energy flow so the TARDIS could 'breathe' more easily. "She just gave a bit too much trying to heal me. Nothing a good night's sleep won't cure."

"But you can still make it to the estate." Remy leaned against the railing by the door.

The Doctor glared at him, then nodded. Having Remy in the TARDIS didn't sit well with him. And consequently caused a bit of trouble. It took a bit of convincing from the Doctor's side for his ship to let the man out of the infirmary. As long as the man who'd betrayed him stayed out of the console's range, he'd be fine. Smirking at the sour looking vineyard owner, the Time Lord recalled the sudden zap when Remy had ventured too close to the TARDIS' heart with satisfaction. If he squinted, he could still see the man's hair standing on end. Pulling another lever and releasing the 'handbrake', the engines started to shake the grating beneath their footing.

When the sound of the ship told him they were traveling inside the vortex, the Doctor had trouble keeping his hands steady. He swallowed a rising nausea and crunched his eyes shut for a moment. He looked up in time to see his friend's worried look. "Not now, Rose," he snapped, knowing he wasn't fair to her. But he really didn't have the time, he needed to concentrate. Making silent calculations in his head, he let the TARDIS materialize around the vortex generator, right after he'd homed in on the fifty first century weapons stashed in one of the cellar's. The two jumps were tricky and it was a good thing the generator wasn't creating a wormhole of it's own, or landing could have become quite nasty. "Right!" He chirped as the ship's console died down and a huge laser-shaped form appeared inside his ship behind him. A frantic beep replaced the sound of the TARDIS' beating engines. "That's it, we're here!"

He jumped up the platform, with much more energy than he had to spare and pelted for access panel to the generator's complicated innards. The beeping increased and he quickly pressed the button to release the steel plating with a whoosh. It took only a few seconds of fumbling with the sonic screwdriver, a yank on the critical wires inside and a solid bump to the machine's funnel for the beeping and humming to cease. He turned. "All done, threat eliminated, planet saved."

An uncomfortable silence greeted him.

"Kind of risky, wasn't it?" Remy broke the still air. "Gambling with the whole of France on the off chance we would get you to your ship in time. You could have waited in the cellar. If you'd told us about the sabotage, we would have agreed to get the TARDIS."

"No, couldn't do that." He shot back coldly, flicked his eyes to Rose and back to Remy again. "There was a small chance the generator would blow up too early," Rose soaked up so much of my energy. She could barely handle it. Combine that with an unstable rift created by you and Salliery right where we were sitting, and things could have gone very bad for the entire universe if she'd stayed where she was." Remy nodded, catching on to his train of thought. The Doctor walked over to him. "I had to get her out of there," he spoke too soft for Rose to hear. When the man didn't say more, he continued. "You can go," he told him brusquely. "Oh and Remy?"

The vineyard owner, only to happy to leave the ship turned on his way out. "Yes?"

"Don't bother looking for the weapons Salliery brought with him. You won't find them."

Remy nodded in understanding. "You're not coming?"

"Better not," he stated, not feeling up to setting one foot in that vine cellar again. I might be tempted to destroy the place entirely.

Rose stepped forward. "I'll go. Can I do that? Say goodbye? Doctor?"

Her unusual meek voice made him acutely aware again of how young she was, how much she acted on instinct, and how he couldn't just leave without giving her the closure she craved for. If he'd been alone, he'd been off to the stars right now. But after nine hundred years, it was Rose who'd taught him that to cope, you sometimes needed to forgive. And who was he to take that from her?

So although he didn't like it, he gave his assent. Watching her walking out the door, he couldn't help but feel proud of her again.

"Blimey," Rose spoke, walking up the console. The door slammed closed behind her. "That was the sweetest goodbye I've ever had, considering what they did to you." Beneath her the grating started to shake and the sound of engines filled the air. The Doctor circled the console, obviously not wasting any time taking off. "Joe promised his government will take care of Salliery, whatever that may mean. Remy actually hugged me, and Michelle was all tears. I think she's grown quite fond of you."

With both hands busy pressing buttons which function Rose could only guess at, the Doctor gave her an incredulous look. "Well, the feeling's not mutual," he scowled.

"No surprise there," she sighed and jumped on one of the chairs. The noise of the engine steadied to a comfortable pace as the Doctor pulled one last lever. For the first time she noticed his hands were shaking. "You, okay?" She swallowed, bracing herself for being rebuffed again.

He took in a deep breath, then looked at her, the muscles in his face too tight to be his usual enthusiastic self. His brown eyes studied her, twirling with a hint of despair. She sensed he was about to close down on her, tell her he was fine and change the subject to something ridiculous as going to a planet harboring dogs with no noses. "Doctor?"

To her surprise his gaze grew thoughtful and he shook his head. Stumbling back, he sat down next to her on a chair and lowered his head to press both palm of his hands into his eyes. He groaned. "I don't know, Rose. Am I?"

Worriedly, she kept silent.

He looked up, and not saying a word, he just pulled her in. "Thank you," he whispered.

Closing her hands around him, Rose nodded into his shoulder. His sudden openness startled her, but that didn't keep her from holding on tightly. "What you need," she smiled, letting go. "Is a good cup of tea."

His grin lightened her heart. "That, Rose Tyler," he all but exclaimed. "is exactly what might do the trick." His age-lines faded and the sparkle in his eyes returned. Yes, he was going to be fine.

Epilogue

When Rose mentioned the tea, he hadn't quite pictured her serving the brew while at the flat on the Powell estate. At first he'd protested, but she was adamant. And he had to admit she'd been right.

Lying on the Tyler's couch, tucked beneath a woolen blanket it felt kind of nice to be fussed over for a change. Certain that he would have resisted a lot more to all the pampering, had he not been so tired –after all, he didn't do domestic- he closed his eyes.

He wondered how long this peace would last. How long before he'd be the cause for the quiet of this family to shatter into a million pieces. His time sense told him something was coming. But maybe… just maybe… he could beat the odds this time. Maybe they could do it.

Rose and him.

So for now, he didn't care, for once he just enjoyed. He let himself drift back into a healing coma. She was safe, they were all safe.

For now, he was home.

The end.