A/N: A completed story. And none of it is mine!

Epilogue

Martha Jones ended up resurfacing inside her small flat's living room, hazily hearing the TV droning. The young woman struggled to emerge from the haze she was in, and directed a bleary eye at the monitor, hazily reading a "Harriet Jones set to reveal new cabinet at 10AM after surprise win in general election." The medical student allowed herself a little smile.

Then she spotted one of the aides corralling the press towards their conference room. Martha's jaw dropped, and her hand went for a non-existent pocket on her pyjamas. She then ran to her handheld phone, frantically composing Francine Jones' number. Martha's mother picked up after a few moments.

"So you finally deign to call back" the older woman said flatly. She was immediately cut off by her daughter.

"Mum, Trish is on TV!"

"Well spotted, Jones" her mother replied sarcastically. "Been trying all week to raise you to tell you the news. Martha, I don't mind you going all-in on your studies, what with your final exams getting closer and closer, but you could at least exchange a couple of texts with your mother every now and then."

"Mum, you're not getting me" Martha said with exasperation. "Trish is alive on TV."

"Yes, and she's lucky to be live on TV so soon after that ridiculous performance at Lazarus Industries" Francine said flatly. "Seriously, what possessed her to believe man could invent a machine to turn themselves fifty-odd years younger at the press of a button? And you could have shown up that night at the very least, by the way, Trish could have done with the support of her sister. I don't get why Harriet Jones decided to hire her off that fiasco."

"At least she didn't get blown up in the disaster" Martha murmured.

"Yeah, well, that's what Trish needed your support for, after your little jaunt on the moon a few weeks ago. Your Rose Tyler must have showed up – I don't see who else that could have been, even if she never actually said her name. Alien girl alright, she was dressed for a hiking trip at a formal evening event, technobabbled weirdly enough to lose every other lab coat in attendance, and shorted Lazarus' space shower cabin with what she called a sonic screwdriver before it could blow up." Francine's voice went reproachful. "But you would know all this already if you'd bothered to keep in touch, young lady."

"I'm sorry, Mum" Martha murmured, more bewildered than sorry. "Got to hang up, I'm calling Trish."

"Press conference at Downing Street, you'll only be able to leave a message."

"I know… Love you, mum."

Martha hung up just in time to spare herself having to explain to her mother why she was now breaking down in tears. She was back in her normal time, her sister was alive, and the Master was gone. After a year enduring hell, everything was finally alright in Martha Jones' world.

Now she could heal.

It was on an uncommonly bright day, on the very last day of October, that Sylvia and Donna Noble buried their husband and father, and it felt to both that they never quite had the time to process what was happening. When Donna had come back home from Egypt slightly after mid-September, her father had been tired and experiencing faint chest pains, but nothing had seemed particularly alarming. The physician had ordered a couple of scans to make sure…

And that was when the Nobles' world had gone free-falling. One moment there was a suspicion of cancerous tumours in the lungs, a hospitalization scheduled, and a biopsy. The next week, another scan in preparation for the biopsy showed metastases in the liver, and the following full body scan had pronounced the death sentence, with another year or so to hope for.

These were devastating news by themselves. By the following week, when they had been waiting for the results of the biopsy, Donna's father already could barely walk to the post office and back to the house. He was still trying to make the most of the situation, and he and Wilf had spent an afternoon looking up a comfortable armchair to spend a good part of the following year in, and Donna, who had listened in, took up a lousy temp job in the city for a month to help finance it. For once, her mother had not harped on Donna's pick.

Then at the next appointment with the oncologist, the quiet and kind man had told Donna's mother not to bother buying equipment for a home hospitalization, and that she shouldn't make plans for Christmas either. Small cell lung cancer, one of the worst and of the fastest progressing. That evening was the one time Donna had seen her mother look utterly defeated. Small mercies: their husband and father hadn't been hospitalized at Royal Hope when the building had vanished in the middle of the day.

Then there had been the warning ahead of starting chemotherapy that in his degraded state, there were one in two odds that it would kill Donna's father rather than slow down the progression of the disease. It was a gamble to try and get to Christmas, and Donna's dad took it.

He had lost. He was gone, five weeks only after the first suspicions something was wrong had arisen. And Donna, her mother and her grandfather stayed behind in front of the tomb for a little private moment after the burial was done.

The freshly dug grave was within seeing distance of another fresh tombstone, of sorts: the monument that had been inaugurated by Harriet Jones a few weeks before, commemorating the victims of Canary Wharf. Donna felt oddly fortunate as she considered how the bodies of a good number of the people on that list would never be found, and their families would only ever, at best, see the names of their departed ones adorning empty sepulchres.

Then Donna spotted the small, lonely figure in black, sat on a bench opposite the memorial, and she couldn't hold back a bitter chuckle. "Of course you'd be there."

"Who's there?" Donna's mother asked dully.

"Friend of mine. Mind if I go and talk to her?"

Donna's mother didn't reply. Her grandfather did, with a wan smile. "Just go. If we need you, you won't be far."

The red-head made her way towards the bench, taking in the changes in her friend's appearance as she did. Gone was the peroxide blonde, Rose's hair had gone entirely white and was cropped in a crew cut, distinctly masculine in look; her face was paler and harder than Donna remembered. The young woman was dressed entirely in black – leather vest, long-sleeved shirt, jeans and safety shoes. But the silhouette, the golden eyes, the generous lips over a prominent jaw and the sad smile all belonged to the Rose Tyler she remembered.

Donna sat down, and the two women stayed in companionable silence for a while.

It was Rose who spoke first. "I'm sorry about your dad."

"Yeah." Donna couldn't help a faint smile. "Should have figured out you'd already know."

"I've known for a while."

A pause. "How long has it been for you?"

"Forty-eight years for me since the last call you'd remember" Rose replied. "Been travelling a fair bit, and I've learned to cope with the responsibilities. Came back here because it's one of a few places where my mum's honoured. For me it's been fifty years to the day since I last saw her."

Donna knew better than to point out Jacqueline Tyler wasn't dead. The Rose Tyler sitting beside her had lived longer in a world where her mother had been lost to her for far longer than she had lived with her. And it struck her the young woman she'd known, barely out of her teens, who'd rescued her on her wedding day was now much older than her. But only her hair and her eyes fit that picture; the face was as fresh and youthful looking as Donna remembered.

"You're a mystery wrapped in an enigma, you know, Rose" she said fondly.

"I live an interesting life" Rose replied quietly.

Donna smiled faintly at that. "You probably won't tell me any details, but just one thing I'm curious about. Has it been forty-eight years since we last talked for you too, or have we stayed in touch?"

Rose pondered over her response for a moment. "We've kept in touch" she said eventually.

"That's good" Donna replied, sounding like she was trying to convince herself. "We're still in touch. That's very good."

There was another pause. The younger woman noticed her friend's fingers were drumming lightly on the bench, probably without Rose realizing she was doing it, and Donna wondered for an instant whether she was boring her friend. It was an unpleasant thought; but then again, this was a day for unpleasant thoughts.

The red-headed woman took a deep breath. "You know, I'm always available if you need to talk to someone." She smiled awkwardly. "I mean, I know I'm probably not going to understand three quarters of what you have to say, but if you need to let something off your chest, I'll be there and listening."

"You've always been" Rose replied quietly "You have for nearly fifty years." And it was more than enough to reassure Donna about their continued friendship.

The redhead cast a glance in the direction of her mother and grandfather. From where she sat, she could see Wilf trying his best to do something to comfort his daughter, even though her mother didn't seem to respond. And Rose had noticed too.

"Go to her" the white-haired woman said quietly.

"Yeah… I should." Donna stood up, and Rose stood with her. The two women looked at one another in silence for another instant.

"Talk to you later" Donna said.

"Yeah." Rose smiled sadly. "Goodbye, Donna."

The pair took off in opposite directions, and Donna quickly reached her mother, who was crying silently, only moving to push away attempts at comforting her. She never noticed Rose was doing very much the same as Sylvia.

"I need to borrow Hubble."

As was his usual manner, the Doctor had just burst into the office of one Pete Tyler, now Director of Torchwood for a little over a year, and blurted out a demand – not the most outrageous one that had occurred in a rapidly lengthening list of similar incidents.

"What seems to be the problem, Doctor?" Pete asked calmly, wishing as often did that the Doctor bothered with at least a hint of courtesy, but that never seemed to happen whenever the time traveling alien had something urgent on his mind. He did, however, know the Time Lord invariably had given excellent reasons…

"Nothing much" the Doctor replied casually. "I'd just like to look at the stars."

… until now.

"You have a vortex manipulator to look at the stars, Doctor" Pete remarked.

The Time Lord grimaced. "Well, about that, it seems to have developed a bit of a fault. Unreliable things, rubbish compared with a TARDIS, but they do in a pinch – when they work properly, that is, which is what this one doesn't do right now, so… Can I borrow Hubble?"

Something about the Time Lord's manner made Pete uneasy. "Why do you need to look at the stars, Doctor?" the human asked.

"Nothing important" the Doctor repeated, his voice pitching higher on those two words. "So… Can I?"

Pete sighed, and stood up from behind his desk. "Look, Doctor, I don't know what's going on, but more to the point, I have a feeling you don't want to tell me what's going on. And I don't like that."

The Doctor groaned. "Look, I'd rather not say, because it's almost certainly nothing other than my eyes playing tricks on me, but on the off-chance there is something I need to make sure."

"It would be simpler if you told me what you think might be going on" Pete insisted.

He hadn't counted on the Time Lord's manner and expression to turn deadly serious. "Pete."

"Yes?"

"I'm not telling you, because if I'm wrong, you don't need to know what I'm worried might be going on can actually be happening."

Pete raised his eyebrows and gave the Doctor a mirthless smile. "You know Doctor, if I didn't know any better I'd say you're barely trying to hide how little you actually trust me."

"It's not like that" the Time Lord replied quietly. "It's that you're only human."

"Would you have told Rose?"

The Doctor gave a long look at Pete. "Maybe you're the one who's barely hiding how little you actually trust me" he ended up saying.

"Would you have told Rose?" Pete insisted.

Another pause. "I wouldn't have needed to."

"Because she trusts you."

The Doctor nodded, and kept looking at Pete, before he spoke again. "There are horrors out there no one needs to know about until they absolutely have to. Especially when there's nothing they can do about it."

"You wouldn't be asking for my assistance if there was nothing I could do about this" Pete countered.

The Doctor smiled wanly. "There really isn't. And I don't actually need you. It's a vast universe. I can get a better telescope. I can even make one."

"Then why do you-"

The Doctor shook his head. "If you wish to know before I'm sure of anything, ask Jackie where you can find me. You'll understand, when you arrive." The Time Lord activated his vortex manipulator, and vanished in a curtain of light.

This I have foreseen, in the wild and the wind. The Wolf will stand here as witness, at the end of everything. The Wolf, and the Children of the Moment. They will all gather, and one of them will die. I have seen. At the time of ending, the Wolf's conscience will be revealed. So cold and dark. Fire is coming. The endless flames. See her. See the Heart of Her.

So speaks Dalek Caan.

To be continued…

A/N: The next story is up, titled The Wandering Wolf, part two of four of these series.

Thanks to ELinkA for a few kind words. And if you've enjoyed this story, please leave a few of yours in the box below.