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Rose Tyler let go of the hand she held. Warmth, comfort, a sense of potential—they weren’t what she needed. Without a glance at the tall man standing at her side, she ran a few steps and dropped to the ground. She stared at the square impression left in the sand of Dårlig Ulv Stranden. Cold dampness soaked into the knees of her trousers.
A cry pushed from her throat as she grabbed fistfuls of that wet sand and ran it between her fingers, mashing it with her palms. With wide sweeps, she spread her hands and erased the square impression of the TARDIS. All that remained was a jumble of overlapping streaks that mimicked the tears freezing on her face.
He’s gone.
She’d told herself that a thousand, thousand times in the years since becoming trapped in the parallel world where versions of her mum and dad were happy, where her little brother was a healthy bundle of screams and smiles, and where Mickey had been given another chance to be with his grandma in her final days. Some of that unexpected happiness had eventually helped heal the scraping wound in her heart—he’s gone—but she’d never stopped looking. Anyone who had expected her to give up didn’t know her at all.
She flinched when gentle fingers closed around her shoulder.
“Time to get up now, sweetheart,” her mum said, her voice both sympathetic and strong. “That’s a girl. Up now. I’ve got you.”
Reluctantly, in both body and soul, she forced trembling legs to obey her mum’s urging. Rose clung to the woman who had been there for her through the worst of the worst. Mum hadn’t always understood or even approved of what it meant for Rose to travel with the Doctor, but she’d come around. She knew plenty about heartbreak. All she’d ever wanted was to protect her daughter from a moment like this.
If for that reason alone, Rose wrapped her arms around her mum and began to sob. The sobs wouldn’t stop. Fatigue, hope, terror, loss—they curled through her insides and squeezed until her breath ran short. She choked on her tears.
“I found him,” she said with halting syllables. “It took traveling through the destruction of reality, but I found him. And I let him go.” Her mum’s windblown hair smelled the way they all did, covered in the stink of fear and the oily, mechanical hell that had been Davros’s dungeon. But Rose buried her face deeper, finding echoes of hair product and perfume. No matter how far they’d traveled, this was still her mum, and they were lucky to have each other to hold.
That didn’t keep her from crying.
“Everything I imagined…it’s done. I was going to travel with him for the rest of my life. That’s gone.”
“Look at me, Rose. Come on. Do it.”
As if her head weighed more than the Earth itself, Rose managed to do as her mum demanded.
“There’s my beautiful girl.” Glossy lips trembled only once as she cleaned Rose’s face of tears and what was probably a mess of smeared mascara. “There’s my strong girl. Now I need you to listen to me. Can you do that after all these years of being so blimmin’ stubborn?”
That drew the smallest smile from a place in Rose that loved her family so deeply. The only anxiety she’d ever had when traveling to the stars was that she could lose them one day.
“I’m listening,” she said. “Not that you’d let me tune you out.”
“You’ve done it plenty of times. Every time you stepped into the TARDIS to go swannin’ off, I was dead certain something would go wrong. I’d never see you again. But I couldn’t stop you, not in a million lifetimes. I’d see that look in your eyes when you came home. You weren’t ever going to stay.” She sniffed. “After a time I didn’t cry anymore when I walked back to the flat alone.”
“Mum, I didn’t know.”
“Of course not. Then I learned that he’d die to keep you safe. Couldn’t say that about many of the chavs in the estates. Today, though… Rose, we came so close.”
“I know.”
“Bombs and Daleks—none of it mattered. I’d have still lost my daughter.” Although she was doing her fair bit to hold steady, Mum was nearly as tearful as Rose. “But I had to accept that a long time ago. You were always going to stay with him.”
“That’s what I thought.” She looked to the sky, which swirled with ash-gray clouds. “Now he’s gone.”
Only an echo remained. A living, breathing echo with heartbeat of a human being.
She kept from searching the beach. Wherever he’d wondered off to, the tall man who looked just like the Doctor… He was wrong. Yet the pull was magnetic—the need to seek him out.
Mum took a deep breath as the wind played games with her scarf. “Rose Tyler, if you want to stay sane in all this, you have to hear me. Really hear me.”
Rose nodded.
“You father’s dead. The Pete Tyler I fell in love with and had a daughter with—he’s been dead since you were a baby. Do you think it’s been easy some nights to realize the Pete I love now isn’t the same man?”
“I… You never said. You both look so happy.”
“We are. But if I think about all that stuff about time and dimensions, well, what a fat lot of good that’d do. A person’d go mad. It’s not how things are supposed to go, unless you meet the Doctor.”
Rose smiled, with more feeling now. “If the TARDIS were here now, I’d go back in time to when you thought he was the worst thing to blunder into my life. You’d have to eat your words.”
“I’d do it too. If I could know then what I know now.” She took Rose’s hands, their chilly fingers intertwined. “You won’t want to hear this, but I have to ask it. Were you the Doctor’s only companion? What was he—some nine hundred years old? Were you the be all, end all?”
“Mum, don’t.”
“Answer me, Rose.”
A tight swallow couldn’t be helped. “No. I wasn’t the only one. But he’s been ten different men. Two of them loved me. Two of them needed me.”
“Will he keep going, now that you’re here? Will he find other companions to go looking for trouble?”
“Yes,” Rose whispered, her heart breaking all over again. She hadn’t thought it possible.
“For a time, you were his special girl. Anyone could’ve seen that. He adored you, and he probably always will.”
“Like the others who came before. Like the ones who’ll come after.”
“I know it hurts. I’d save you from it if I could. But sweetheart, there’s a third man. He needs you in ways the Doctor never could.”
Softly, she turned Rose toward the edge of the beach, where a rock marked the meeting of sand and waves. There was the Doctor. Her heart skipped. Then it thudded back to reality.
He stood watching the turbulent waters of Bad Wolf Bay. His legs were slightly spread, bracing against the wind. His hands were shoved in his trouser pockets, crumpling the line of his coat. His hair was a tousled mess.
He and the real Doctor were identical, but something was wrong. Tracing every line with curiosity that got the better of her in seconds, she searched for the difference. Differences. The Doctor had always lifted his chin toward a horizon. He dared the universe to show him what he’d never seen before. And in some of the toughest situations, he still held an ease about him—in his shoulders and his jaw. He was arrogant and tenacious and caring to a fault. He never approached anything with reservation.
The man on the beach was tense. His shoulders were a sharp line. His jaw was fixed. And worst of all, his chin was dipped toward his chest.
“The Doctor will carry on,” Mum said. “No matter how hard that’ll be on him or how hard it was for you to admit. But him… I mean, really, Rose. Does he have anything but the clothes on his back?”
He needs you. And that’s very me.
“Waking up in the same place every morning.” Rose blinked back tears that welled for new reasons. “Never running again. Just breathing the same air day in, day out… It’ll drive him mad.”
“You see now? He’s never had a companion. And if you make it happen, he’ll never have another. Just you. Someone to show him the way.”
Rose hugged her mum again, holding on with all she had, and kissed her forehead. “I love you.”
Mum nodded to where the solitary figure still stood buffeted by the elements. “Then fix this. I want my Rose back. You haven’t smiled in so long, sweetheart. You haven’t laughed in even longer. Let this be your chance.”
Rose pulled away and dragged trembling fingertips under her eyes. No more crying. No more regret. Was that possible?
Sand clung to her trainers as she took the first step toward the waves that sloshed with a trance-like rhythm. She pulled a strand of hair from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear.
The tension in his shoulders began to bother her more and more. Was he so wary?
Of course he was. She’d dropped his hand and held onto the grainy remnants of where the TARDIS had been. If that wasn’t outright rejection, she didn’t know what was. Only, it hadn’t felt like rejection. It had felt like mourning.
She needed to let him know that.
Thought slipped away when she stood near enough to feel the warmth of his body. She simply took his hand, as they always had—as they had from the start. With one eyebrow arched, he looked down at their hands, and then at her. His expression was a combination of caution and hope.
Dizzy on the same cocktail of emotions, she wrapped her other arm around his as they stood together. “I know it’s not fair,” she said against the sleeve of his coat. “But no matter what happens, I’ll always hate Norway.”
***
The Doctor wasn’t used to being without words. Nine hundred years were stuffed in his mind, but his physical form had been breathing for little more than six hours. Holding onto sanity was tricky. He held onto Rose instead. And hadn’t that always been the way? In life or in dream, she had been his compass. He should've been old enough to know better.
Maybe he’d been heading to this point, irrevocably. Timelines had converged on Donna, but that was a recent anomaly. When he’d regenerated after the destruction of the mutated Dalek Emperor and its warped, insane fleet, he’d thought only of Rose. She’d looked into the heart of the TARDIS to save him. Then, with that same energy coursing through his body, with every cell dying, he had come back to life—and Rose had been his center. He’d wanted to be the sort of man she would never leave.
“Theres’s no reason to come back,” he said. “In fact, I’d rather not.” The surf and wind tried to steal his voice. He sounded like himself, yet he was so different as to be stars on opposite sides of a galaxy. He felt changes at a subatomic level.
Part of him had always wanted to be human. For her. For them together.
Now he was.
And he had no idea what to do.
“Besides.” He tried for the levity he desperately needed. “I’ve never been keen on the name. Too ominous. But the Bad Wolf was always vain. You named everything after yourself.”
“Only the important stuff.”
“This is a place for goodbyes. I suppose that’s important enough.”
She was gripping his arm. He wanted a promise that she always would when she was lonely or scared or just in need of being at his side. He hadn’t needed promises like that before.
“This,” she said. “This is the time when I usually ask you what next.”
“Usually. Still, I hope you learned something when traveling. How much of what we saw was ever usual?”
“That Earth replica colony out by….?”
“Kree Belt Seven.”
“That’s it. You remember? It was so ordinary we were bored in an hour.”
“Well, that made it unusual in itself.”
She looked up at him. Obviously she’d been crying, which brought out the strong hazel shine of her eyes. “But… That wasn’t you.”
“No. It wasn’t me.” He blinked back the throb in his head as his mind adjusted to all that shouldn’t be. Yet this would be real for rest of his life—a mortal life. “And you were right. This isn’t the moment you ask me what’s next. It’s when I ask you.”
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Because he’s gone.”
“Yes.”
He exhaled. “Because a man who looks like the Doctor and sounds like the Doctor is a nasty trick?”
“It’s not that—”
“Do you think I lied? About what I said?”
Their stares collided. He saw the war in her mind. He was witnessing the synapses of her brain lobbing shots at one another, fighting, determining their futures.
“You didn’t lie,” she said finally. “But you don’t know me. Not really. You’re just a copy.”
He was surprised when the vehemence of that phrase—just a copy—stabbed to the core. On occasion he’d seen anger and confusion from Rose, along with plenty of sass and even suspicion. Mostly he’d come to rely on the safety of finding trust and adoration in her expression.
Now there was bitterness.
“A copy,” he repeated into the wind.
He got scared then, truly scared. She’d made a choice in a moment wrought with so much emotion that he was still reeling. That kiss. That passion. The relief that came with finally being able to say what he felt—he had never experienced anything like it. But regret was the enemy now. She might not be able to stand him, the sight or sound of him, once the crisis passed.
Years ago, he’d temporarily changed his physiology to become a human being. By doing so, he had kept Earth safe from a species that fed off Time Lord energy. In those months on the eve of the Great War, he had fallen in love with Joan Redfern, a quiet, intelligent teacher any man would be lucky to have. She hadn’t even been able to look at him once she witnessed his true nature.
Now he was truly human and would be until he drew his last breath. There was no pocketwatch for Rose to open and bring the real Doctor back.
“I want you to try to imagine something,” he began, because he needed to start somewhere. “Pretend every memory you have, every thought, every misery or happiness or sleepless night—think hard. Now pretend those memories aren’t yours. Not even your name is yours. The love you have for the people in your life is a borrowed emotion.” He looked down at her. “Who would you be then? Would you be Rose Tyler? Or would you be a vessel with someone else’s life crammed inside an empty brain?”
“I’d still think I was myself.”
There was hope. He felt the lurch of it in the beat of his single heart. He saw the need for it in her shimmering eyes—eyes that still trusted him.
“Try this,” he said. “Tell me the story of how you met the Doctor. But do it as if describing another woman with blonde hair and a giant smile and way too much curiosity for just one planet. Someone else named Rose. Try it.”
She let go of his coat and faced him. Her arms were crossed against the buffeting, salty breeze. “I—” She cleared her throat, appearing frustrated. “There was this girl name Rose who worked in a shop. She was in the basement trying to give the chief electrician his share of the lotto winnings. I couldn’t… She couldn’t find Wilson. It was dark. Creepy. Then there were noises. Rose kept looking, but these shop window dummies started to come out of everywhere. And there was a man. No—just his hand. He grabbed my hand and we ran.”
“What did I look like?”
“Really short hair. Dark brown. You had this beat up leather jacket over a jumper. Your face was kinda craggy. Your smile was mental. I never saw anyone look happy and sinister at the same time. You told me Wilson was dead.” She jerked her head up, meeting him eye to eye. “And you had this mechanical thing…”
“Not so easy, is it?”
“But that was me.” She stepped away from him. “I was there. You weren’t.”
“I wasn’t in a lot of ways. You described a different Doctor. Regeneration changes every cell in a Time Lord’s body. It’s death for one self, while another man lives on. The memories stay, the mind stays, but everything else is new. It’s traumatic.” He held out his hands, filling half of the space between them. “You wrapped your head around that and stayed with me. Can you do it again?”
His hands felt leaden as he held them out, waiting, silently urging her to do the impossible once more. Companions had stayed with him through regenerations before, but this was different. They would always know the truth. He was not the Doctor.
Admitting that to himself was more jarring than he would’ve imagined. And more painful.
He shut those thoughts away. His fingertips were cold, and Rose still hadn’t moved.
“It was hard,” she said. “I was nervous you wouldn’t want me. And who were you, really? I already thought that about the Doctor at the start. I was just going to step back into the TARDIS with this bloke who claimed to be the man I…”
She glanced down at the sand, then bridged the distance between them. Her fingers were as cold as his. Blonde hair framed her face.
“You were him. And you weren’t.”
“Like now,” he said. “The new, new, new Doctor.”
After a tight laugh, she gave him the smile he’d come to adore. Generous. Candid. All bright teeth and brighter wonder. “There’s no applegrass here. And I don’t even know what to call you.”
“The Doctor. Well, minus the new, new, new part.”
That got another smile out of her. “You need better than that here. No psychic paper to convince people of whatever you want.”
“John Smith, then.”
“Right. That’s so much more believable.” An idea clicked behind her eyes. He could see the shift. They were on the edge of something. He didn’t know what it was, but anything was better than watching Rose back away from him—or worse, kneeling in the sand where the TARDIS had been. “You have a mother this time,” she continued. “Donna. She helped create you, as much as the Doctor did. ‘John Smith’ leaves her out of it.”
Donna.
He knew what would become of her. The part of him he knew was cowardly, always on the run, was glad he wouldn’t be there at the end of her story. Even if Donna survived the metacrisis, losing his best friend would cripple the Doctor. He’d be back on his own.
Rose couldn’t know that truth. Not yet. Her regret at leaving the Doctor to travel on his own… She was already filled with remorse.
“I don’t want to leave Donna behind,” he said quietly. “She was an incredible woman.”
“Then she needs to be a part of you. You’re Dr. John Noble-Smith.”
He smiled, a little sad. “I like that.”
“And you’re still a doctor, because I know I’ll slip up. A lot. I can’t look at you and think of you any other way.”
“Even though you know truth?”
“That’s right. After all, who would I be if I’m not Rose Tyler?” Her hands tightened around his. “But you’re finally going to answer some questions for me, Doctor.”
***
“Questions?”
Rose liked that he appeared a little apprehensive, with his eyebrows drawn together in that deep, expressive way. This was all new. It was like a regeneration. She would need to learn this version all over again. Maybe that wasn’t as heartbreaking as she’d first dreaded.
“The things the Doctor wouldn’t tell me in a trillion years.”
“Such as?”
“When did he fall in love with me?”
“A moment?”
“If there was one.”
Her pulse pounded as she waited. No, it wasn’t just her pulse. The distant horizon over the sand revealed the silhouette of a helicopter. That would be her father. Or Pete Tyler from another dimension. She’d accepted him, just as her mum had.
“The cavalry?” he asked, nodding toward the helicopter.
“Dad, yeah.” She slipped her glance up. “That’s not going to let you off the hook.”
“Pumping me for information. Is that your goal here?”
Rose wrapped around his arm and tucked in close. “That’s the idea. He couldn’t. I know he was protecting me from getting my hopes up. His too. But I need some hope now, Doctor. Tell me who you really are under all that Time Lord fear.”
That distinctive frown reappeared. “Fear?”
“Staying in one place. Caring too much. Being alone. If all this is real, then we’re stuck together. So new, new, new Doctor—out with it.”
His eyes followed the approach of the helicopter, but his gaze was inward. She’d seen that look a thousand times. Nine hundred years of memories sometimes caught up with him. But after a while, she'd given up asking him to share. He was the cleverest being in any universe when it came to changing the subject.
“It was just after we stood watching what was left of the Earth. We held hands watching the flotsam. The only way I knew to ease your sadness was to take you back to the twentieth-first century.”
“Smack bang in the middle of London. People everywhere. And you told me about Gallifrey.”
“I hadn’t said it aloud before. My planet was gone. My entire race. It was a hammer in my head all the time, but forming the words…” He cleared his throat. Sand kicked up as the helicopter descended. “You asked questions, but you didn’t press. You didn’t pity me. You just said, ‘There’s me’—that I didn’t have to be on my own anymore. Then you wanted chips. Of all things. It was so normal. Human, but normal. You made me laugh, Rose. In that little kebab shop, we ate the worst chips of all time, and you made me laugh. It was like being able to breathe again.”
Her chest was tight. Tears stung behind her lids. She was awed and touched with a little disbelief. “That was so early.”
“Yes. It was.”
She could almost hear echoes of the mysterious man she’d first run away with. Back then, he’d alternated clipped syllables with glib double-speak that hid deeper pain. Born in battle. Full of blood and anger and revenge. Eventually, that pain had eased. Rose had seen it, even felt it, like the uncoiling of a knot. That had been because of her? Almost from the start?
The revelation was strengthening. Maybe the Doctor had been right in those moments before he left this reality forever. Even her mum had got it right. This should-be-stranger needed her. He had only fifty years to let go of that pain all over again.
The helicopter landed in a dirty swirl of damp sand. Mum waved. Pete Tyler hugged her and held on tight. He’d known how much danger they would all be in by leaving. Now he had his wife back. He didn’t question parallel realities or dwell on the strange chain of events that had brought them to that moment. Rose watched in awe.
Could it be that simple?
If she let it be?
She looked up at the Doctor, whose expression was eerily blank. No surprise. He’d just revealed what he never could have as a Time Lord: the moment he’d fallen in love with her. Chips and laughter and the enthusiasm of her young, hopeful words, that traveling was better with two.
“You’re wrong, you know,” she said, while unexpected happiness began to bubble. “The worst chips were at that school with the Krillitanes.”
“You thought they were great.”
“I can’t get everything right.” She tugged his arm. “Now come on. Time to get off this beach for good.”
“Are you sure?”
Her lungs slowed. Her heart slowed. Even time seemed to slow. “Are you my Doctor? Just mine?”
“Just yours.”
“Then I’m sure…if I can tell you the treacly things I’ve kept quiet so long.”
“Do we have to?”
But oh, he was grinning. She loved that grin, so charming and easygoing. Then she made a promise to herself. She would do her best to dispel the edge of fury that had always lurked beneath the skin of the Time Lord she would never see again. It was the gift she could give both men.
“I’m sorry, Doctor. A bit of treacle is the price of spending the rest of your life with me.”
***
He held back from joining the Tylers at the helicopter, content and even curious at how the family had matured as a unit.
Time and Pete Tyler had never got on. His life had been irrevocably warped by ruptures in reality and versions of people he never should’ve met. In the end, it didn’t matter. He had his loved ones back. Rose threw herself into his arms. Pete gave her a swing that lifted her shoes off the sand. The man was wearing a heavy jumper under a coat suited to the bay’s harsh wind. The Doctor had never seen him so casually dressed. Here, Pete Tyler was one of the most important me in Britain. Family life seemed to have softened the sharp edges honed by work and disappointments.
There was a comfort in that. Twice now, the Time Lord known to the universe only as the Doctor had lost Rose to this parallel reality, but through that tragedy, her presence here had touched others. The Tylers had become the family they were strangely, improbably, meant to be. Responsibility, loss, sacrifice, fear—all had colored the Doctor’s decision to leave once again, but that knowledge had likely figured in.
Sorting through nine hundred years of memories wasn’t always easy, but some were fixed, like the fixed points in time and space that could never be undone. Seeing Rose falling toward the Void was one of them. Terror still shot through him as stunning as a lighting strike when he recalled the abject fear on her face. She would’ve been lost to a never-ending hell. That she had been rescued by the man she held now—a version of the father she’d lost as a baby—had been a balm against one of the sharpest hurts the Doctor had ever known.
He didn’t like surprises. But he was human now. Surprises would be part of the adventure of living, day in, day out.
He wasn’t ready.
No wonder the Doctor had always run.
Rose whipped hair off her cheeks and looked at him from across the stretch of churned sand. The sand would return to its calm smoothness when they were gone, as if none of these difficult transitions had ever happened. That he could grasp. The whole of time and space rarely cared for individuals, Time Lord or not. They—no, he—had to make his own way.
But Rose waved him over, smiling, as if to remind him that his journey through a human life did not need to be undertaken alone.
Hands in his pockets, he walked toward the trio of Tylers. He wanted arrogant assurance. Instead, he felt stiff and uncertain.
Pete’s expression was one of surprise. “You brought the Doctor here?” Then he shook his head. “I thought for sure if you found him again, you’d never come back.”
She would have left. But the Doctor had forced her hand.
In truth, both men had acted in unspoken collusion. They had played out a silent drama in order to give Rose the best, safest life possible. Yet the Doctor had been the one to bury his emotions and, in the end, turn away. There would be no more surprises regarding Rose Tyler, certainly, but the scar would remain. By contrast, the man who would be John Noble-Smith for the rest of his life had finally been at liberty to say what he truly felt, like exhaling a breath held for years. Selfish emotion had perfectly suited that pivotal moment. Only now did he truly understand and appreciated what he’d gained at the expense of his predecessor.
He stood taller. He had been handed a gift in having been born at all, and at having become Rose’s choice. She was the companion he had never dared imagine as a Time Lord—one who would see him through to the end.
He had to be ready. Anything less would be an unforgivable waste.
“This is…” Rose said, her voice tight. “He’s…”
Jackie laughed. She sounded tired. “It’s a long story, Pete. I’ll muck it up if I try to tell it.”
“But who is he?”
“I’m John Noble-Smith.” He held out his hand. “And here I am in Pete’s World. Good to meet you again.”
Despite his obvious confusion, Pete Tyler shook hands. He was an older version of the father Rose had met in 1987, the year of his death, but the real difference was in the man’s eyes. He was canny and sharp-minded. He missed nothing. His suspicion and protective air were obvious.
Rose relinquished her hold on her father and rejoined the Doctor. What had they said? He was her Doctor. Side by side. Hand in hand. Like always—yet completely new.
“Dad, the long story can wait. It’s cold and we just want to be… I don’t want to be here. This is a human version of the Doctor and he’ll be staying with us. With me. Can you accept that? For now?”
Pete split his sharp gaze between Jackie, Rose, and the Doctor, then nodded. “It’s about ninety minutes to the airfield. The plane’s waiting there to take us back to London.”
“Not exactly the TARDIS,” Rose said, barely audible as they climbed into the helicopter.
The Doctor took a seat beside her, hip-to-hip. “So this is how it goes? I’m supposed to sit back and enjoy the ride?”
She smiled unexpectedly. That she had referred to the TARDIS in a subtly lighthearted way had been a surprise. Now she was smiling again. He felt a fist in his chest begin to unclench. The remnants of the battle they’d survived still burned in his blood, but he pushed back and pushed again until he found himself in a strange place.
The present.
“That’s the idea,” she said. “You’ll have to begin to trust me about this. I was the Doctor’s companion. Sitting back and enjoying the ride was a job requirement.”
The whirr of the helicopter made further speech impossible as they took off. He leaned toward Rose to look out her window, too, as they banked across the beach. Footprints and a particular square impression in the sand faded as they lifted higher into the sky. It was a profound moment—another fixed point.
Rose leaned on his shoulder for most of the trip, sometimes staring into a vague middle distance, sometimes lightly dozing. The Doctor kept his arm around her. He traveled deeper into himself, beyond the helicopter’s noise and vibrations, to focus on the beating of his single heart. That rhythm was one of many things he would have to get used to.
Somewhere over an endless stretch of water, Jackie reached back to hand him a helmet that contained an earpiece and microphone. She and Pete already wore theirs. Curious, he put his on while trying not to wake Rose. His curiosity was rewarded as he listened to Jackie retell the story of their travails in her native reality. She’d been right; she mucked it up, but the Doctor couldn’t help but grin at her enthusiasm. Her words were the flapping wings of a hummingbird, fast and blurred by what sounded like relieved excitement. Davros and the Reality Bomb, then a jumbled explanation of Donna and how the two Doctors had come about.
Pete nodded as he skillfully maneuvered the helicopter, but a perpetual line narrowed between his brows. Rose would straighten him out later, or he would do what he had proven capable of over the years. He rolled with the unbelievable and took what good he could from even the strangest situations.
By the time they arrived at a private airfield and stepped off the helicopter, Pete looked at the Doctor and shook his head. “She’s my daughter now. You will not hurt her.”
“You’re right.”
Rose appeared fatigued, but she perked up at their tense words. “So, all that’s cleared up. You can stand down, Dad.”
Pete kissed her on the head, shot the Doctor one more assessing inspection, and turned toward a private plane readied for takeoff. He and Jackie talked with the pilot.
“They look happy,” the Doctor said.
“They should do. You wouldn’t believe the fuss Dad made when he learned what I was working on at Torchwood. Then Mum and Micky wanted to come along. He was a mess. I’m surprised he’s as put together as he is.”
“Jackie explained everything while you slept.”
Rose laughed. “How’d that go?”
“As well as you might think.” He stood facing her, close, their foreheads, shoulders, and hands touching. “Now it’s your turn, you know.”
“My turn for what?”
“When did you fall in love with me?”
“I haven’t yet.” She paired her guileless eyes with his narrowed ones. “It’s true. Every minute that passes, you’re more human and less Time Lord. One day, I’ll look at you and I’ll see you for who you are. Something will click. I’ll love you for you.”
Anticipation settled over him, warm and electric. “I’ll like that.”
“Me too.”
“I suppose that means I’ll do the same with you in return.”
“I hope so.” She stared over his shoulder, in the unforgiving distance. “We have memories we won’t ever be able to share with anyone else. But I don’t want to depend on them forever.”
“No?”
A blink or two cleared a glitter of tears. “What did you once say? The past is another country.”
“Now it’s another universe.”
She squeezed his hands. “We’re here now. I like this.”
“I’ll like it better when you tell me about you and the Doctor.”
“I thought you didn’t want the treacly parts.”
With an intensity dragged up from a cellular level, he stared at her mouth until he couldn’t help but trace her bottom lip with his thumb. “I don’t know what I want. I’ll be new at this for a while. Forgive me?”
She shivered and wrapped her arms around his waist. Her cheek lay against his shirtfront. “Forgiven.”
“Then tell me. I need that…perspective, I think. Where did we start?”
Rose pulled away and glanced to where her mum and dad stood with the pilot. Another man had arrived. They must be close to completing preparations for take-off. The Doctor wanted them to wait, or for Rose to talk faster, because suddenly the need to know this part of their history was a compulsion. He’d always wondered, and he’d always forced himself to hide that wondering away. Now he felt the moment would be lost if they were interrupted.
“It was when you took me back to see Dad. I know you didn’t want to. You knew it was dangerous. And you got so angry when I saved his life. God, you had such a temper. That was the first time you’d aimed it at me.”
“I was furious,” he said tightly. “It was reflex to raise my defenses and convince myself I’d been conned.”
“Yet… After all the fear that day, when I thought I’d lost you…” She cleared her throat. “I’d been kneeling in the middle of the road, holding Dad’s hand while he died. Then he was gone. When I stood up…you were right in front of me. Your face was somber, but you weren’t angry anymore. No judgment. You didn’t say, ‘I told you so.’ You were just there for me, letting me mourn. We walked back to the TARDIS together. Off we went.”
A shiver worked across her shoulders. The Doctor held on tighter.
“I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I kept going back to what happened. You went through all that for me, even when you knew you shouldn’t. When I made things go wrong… It doesn’t matter now. I just knew I couldn’t ever leave you, and that you’d break my heart if you left me. That’s love, isn’t it?”
The Doctor nodded. He touched her lip again, where she was warm and trembling. “That’s what it feels like to me.”
Pete shouted for them from across the airstrip. Jackie waved them over.
“So.” Rose took a deep breath. She stood on tiptoe and placed a quick kiss on his cheek. She looked unbearable shy when she pulled away. “Heading home. This is it.”
“That almost sounds like a dare,” he said. “You think I have anywhere else to be?”
“I’ll leave you here if that’s why you want to stay with me.”
“You know a couple versions of me better than that.”
“Prove it.”
The Doctor bent down and whispered against the soft place below her earlobe. “Here we go, Rose Tyler. Show me your life. Let me share it.” He closed his eyes and breathed her in. “I’ve been told it’s better with two.”