Three hours later and their regrouping strategy had finally paid off. Through sharing their seperate knowledge of the situation and some rather brilliant thinking on Donna's part, they had come up with a promising plan that involved replacing the DNA sample with a live Dalek one: effectively turning their own weapon against them. With Martha sidelined, the others had all been assigned a task. Donna would stay with Martha, who would explain to her the shortest way to get to the room without being detected as well as the ins and outs of the building. Jack would recover a sample of DNA that was being kept in the Torchwood vaults. The Doctor and Rose would attempt to recover the TARDIS. It involved entering the UNIT base again, which would be difficult, but it was the only way that they could revive the sample. Finally, Donna and Jack would meet them there so that they could apply the final phase: switching the sample with whomever they had managed to replace Martha with, give the Daleks a choice and stop them from destroying the human race.
Just making their way through the streets had proven itself more difficult than expected for the Doctor and Rose. Unlike the ghost town they had encountered earlier, the streets of London were filled with Daleks now and people racing away from them. Apparently, recovering a new live sample had also proven itself to be more difficult than expected. There had been much running, the Doctor obviously annoyed by Rose's apparent need to stop rather often to catch her breath. When asked if anything was wrong, she offered that she was tired and weary from travelling through the dimensions, which prompted the Doctor to bring up the subject once more while they were hiding from a group of Daleks in a small alley.
"How did you come across?" the Doctor asked, pulling away from the corner and facing Rose. From the tone of his voice to the spark in his eyes, she could see he was not simply curious or making conversation.
"I don't see how that's relevant right now," Rose commented coldly, refusing to look down under the weight of his gaze.
"Relevant? Rose...We're surrounded by Daleks that apparently came from nowhere, with the universe collapsing on itself. I'd say it's incredibly relevant," the Doctor countered, stepping towards her. She had seen him do this before, when trying to intimidate people, but never to her. She found that she profondly disliked it.
"It is not relevant, Doctor," she replied, enunciating every syllable slowly and deliberately as if trying to drive her point across or as if she were talking to an idiot child. From his cold glare, he was clearly not impressed.
"Humor me."
Somewhere down the street, a loud explosion went off, soon followed by the sound of screams. Rose turned away from the Doctor and lauched herself towards the source of the sound, but was violently jerked backwards when the Doctor grabbed her arm and spun her around. She stared down at where the Doctor's fingers were digging into her flesh, then back up at him. "Let go of me."
"No. Tell me, Rose. What's so wrong that you wouldn't want to tell me?"
The screaming at the end of the street subsided and Rose wondered if it was because the initial shock had passed, or because they were all dead. The Doctor's gaze was unrelenting, almost as if he cared of nothing else, but she knew that the impression it gave was wrong. He cared beyond the telling of it and this was precisely why he would not let this go. He reminded her so much of his previous self then, she could barely look at him.
"I got pulled across. No technology, no alien device. The stars started going out in my world before they did in yours, before it happened for the first time."
He still held on to her arm, a deep frown now creasing his brow. "Pulled across? How?"
She did not want to answer this question. Not here, not now. Not in a dark alley while the Daleks were killing people, threatening to trap another live sample and activate the Crucible that would destroy all human beings by just pressing one button. Not while he was looking at her like he did not know her. She could not find words of her own, so she used his.
"When the Time Lords kept their eye on everything, you could hop between realities, home in time for tea..." she sighed, her shoulders sagging. Then she glared at him and continued in a tone of reproach. "You could've said that what was needed was a second gallifreyan mind in the other universe to make the connection, would've saved me a lot of confusion."
He stared at her, dumbfounded. "What?"
"I'm pregnant, Doctor."
Idiot child was a fitting comparison, she thought as he continued to stared at her, obviously still not getting it. "With a baby," she added helpfully.
"Whose baby is that?" he frowned, tilting his head to the side as if it would aid his thought process. She knew she ought to be offended by that but she had to admit that the question a legitimate one, since they had not seen each other in two years and had been together only once, before he regenerated.
"Yours."
"But that's impossible. Unless you're 38 months, two weeks, one day and five hours pregnant," came his dubious response, his eyes darting up as he calculated the time since they had been intimate.
"I am."
He let go of her arm then, stumbling back a few steps as his eyes sunk down to her very flat stomach. She could not help a smug grin at his expression of bewilderement. It was to be expected after all, she looked anything but pregnant. There were so few people in the know, but even they sometimes forgot about her pregnancy.
"They're bigger on the inside, my clothes that is. Much bigger on the inside", she amended, rolling her eyes at the mental image of her own swollen stomach. Truth was, she looked to be around 38 weeks pregnant, which she had always thought was the only part of her pregnancy that made any sense. She had followed a steady pattern of one month per every one week growth in a normal human pregnancy. Considering how complex the gallifreyan anatomy was compared to the human one, that had been a mystery quickly solved. He looked up at her and she instinctively knew what his question was. "We extrapolated the technology based on the pockets of my pants. Remember how you made those bigger because you were tired of always stumbling on my stuff while looking for something in your own pockets? And when I say "we", I mean a very small group of scientists sworn to secrecy and threatened of prosecution for treason if they ever make even a vague mention of it. It's the only thing we've used on it so far, a small wardrobe I can use to hide my pregnancy from Torchwood..No one but my family and physician know."
He seemed incapable of speech as he continued to stare at her. She had fancied that she could read him like an open book, a lifetime ago, but she was unable to read his current expression. It was like this that she left him, frozen in place as she rushed out of the alley following a second explosion. A second later, he was rushing after her, crying out her name. She was running a few meters ahead of him when the explosion went off and sent her flying through the air, projecting her against a brick wall. She hit the wall and crashed down to the ground, her arms flailing about like a morbid rag doll.
The Doctor felt as though the ground had caved in under him, all the blood rushing from his face as he threw himself on his knees next to her unconcious form. Even with the help of his respiratory bypass system, he felt as though he was struggling for air as he carefully turned her on her back, examining the damage. She was out cold.