I don't own anything
"It's raining and I've done my hair, and I haven't got an umbrella that works for horizontal rain; I'm not going for a stroll through the streets of some planet where the rain might be dangerous as well as getting me wet."
The Doctor sighed, immediately regretting mentioning the horizontal aspect of the rain. "Rose, I've been to the Juaneen's planet many times, and I've never experienced any type of rain that's damaged me." He pulled a face, one Rose had never seen on his Northern former self, and ran a hand through his hair. "Weelll, it might make my hair a little flat—but it's nothing permanent. It'll be fun!"
Yet Rose continued to shake her head, the species inhabiting the planet giving her yet another reason why she didn't want to go. "They're the Slitheen's cousins—"
"—distant cousins," the Doctor interjected.
"—and last time, they tried to become me, Doctor. I ain't spending no time with anything like that—especially not on their planet." Rose was adamant that she wasn't going. It was going to be the first day the Doctor went on an adventure without her in a year and a half, and whilst she might be jealous later, she didn't want to see the Slitheen (or their relatives) ever again. It was worth missing some exotic market—and watching the Doctor try to find something banana flavoured.
"I'll hold your hand the entire time?" He tried one last thing to persuade her, and whist having a long time in constant contact with the Doctor was something Rose loved, it wasn't worth it in this case.
"I'm having a day off in the TARDIS—some girly time," Rose insisted firmly. "No more discussion, Doctor. Have fun at your marketplace, and try not to become Slitheen food."
Ten more minutes of pleading and "we'll go somewhere else," continued, until Rose managed to convince him that she really wanted just one day off. Part of her thought that the reason he pressed to stay was that he didn't trust her in the TARDIS alone—and when she voiced that suspicion, it was the thing that finally persuaded the Doctor to leave. When he left, alone and slightly unhappy about not having Rose by his side, Rose curled up in her favourite chair in the library with the last Harry Potter book—she'd have to be careful not to spoil it for her mum or Mickey.
That was, until she heard a bang on the TARDIS door.
As usual, the Doctor had locked the door on his way out—if Rose needed out, she had her own key after all—so the banging, which now seemed to actually be in the console room, was a strange occurrence. He wouldn't—couldn't—be back already, so either the TARDIS was flying herself off somewhere (it wouldn't be the first time)…or someone had managed to break in, and was bashing up the console for scrap.
Slowly, Rose progressed towards the console room, grabbing her emergency crowbar—her mum had insisted she take it, though this was the first time Rose had considered it a useful thing to have brought—on the way, ready prepared to crack the intruder in the head.
As she moved closer and was able to see the figure in the room, Rose grew ever so slightly confused. The person was a man, but he didn't seem to be doing anything other than hug the console; the banging was various pieces of metal which seemed to have no function Rose had been able to ascertain, though as the man spoke, it slowly stopped. She was unable to make out most of the quickly spoken words, yet she could hear the tone of the voice: wistful, excited…and afraid.
The combination of emotions in one single voice could only be one person, but Rose refused to admit it. This couldn't be her Doctor; he couldn't have had to regenerate in the last ten minutes…and anyway, he would have found a way to get back to her before he finished. He wouldn't want to have to try and explain to her that he had changed (again) without having the proof of actually changing in front of her; it was hard enough to persuade her last time. He had to either be an older or a younger version, but him just even being here was surely a paradox.
Rose decided she had had enough of contemplation and theories; she decided to act.
Jumping out, crowbar in hand, she said firmly and clearly, "I don't know who you are, mate, but if you don't turn around and tell me why you're in the Doctor's TARDIS—and mine, I suppose—you're getting this in the head. Believe me, I can do it." All she could hope was that the uncertainty she felt within her wasn't detectable in her voice.
Agonisingly slowly, the stranger turned around, a wry smile on his face that was both the same and completely different to the one both her Doctors had worn. His hands were in the air, by his ears, and a bowtie hung around his neck, untied, as though he had decided to leave ten minutes earlier than he had planned, so wasn't ready.
"I remember you with that crowbar, Rose Tyler—remember when you whacked a dummy made of straw so hard that its head flew off and your shriek helped the creature chasing us locate us using its superior hearing of women's yells?" The man replied, causing Rose to take a step back. He had to be lying; he couldn't be…
The Doctor had always told her that he refused to cross his own time stream, for fear of creating paradoxes that he couldn't resolve. It was something he had kept to for over nine hundred years, so why he would decide to change it in his future, Rose could only guess at. Yet the familiarity he looked at her with…she didn't know anyone else that well—besides her mum and Mickey of course, but it couldn't be either of them—but could it really be him?
"That hasn't happened…" she replied slowly, thinking through his words and realising that such a thing had never occurred to her and the Doctor.
The stranger threw one of his hands against his head and made a noise she recognised well—a noise that she pretended hadn't happened, because it made her pretence a little easier to keep up. "Of course! This is before you visit for the dinner with your mother—by the way, don't take her flowers, she's suffering badly from hayfever, oh no I shouldn't have told you that—so of course you haven't used the crowbar yet. Oh, well, I suppose a little foresight won't hurt you!" He positively beamed at her at this point, but underneath the near manic happiness, Rose could see a crumbling man, someone near to the edge.
Someone who looked like he was living his last breaths.
Within seconds, Rose found herself taking the step closer to the man she now accepted—at least in her head—as the Doctor from the future. "You've never said that before," she said, her eyes focused on the face of the man in front of her. Her breathing increased as she processed everything about him, from his physical appearance (still not ginger) to everything she could read in his expression, his eyes, the way that he held himself…and even the way that he looked at her. "Who are you? What do you want?"
Ever so slightly, the man took a step closer to her, moving his hands to run through his hair before digging into his pockets to pull out a sonic screwdriver which looked completely dissimilar to the one her Doctor had. "I'm the Doctor. I think you knew that straight away, otherwise you would have tried to kill me. As for the reason why I'm here…it's very delicate, and I have to ask you a very big favour. I know you won't want to do it—it'll be a betrayal not to tell me…him—but I must ask it of you, Rose Tyler."
She bit her lip. "What is it?" She didn't like lying, especially to the Doctor, and the fact that he wanted her to do it made her realise that this man was very different to her Doctor. Her Doctor never showed her when he was willing to keep things from her (besides emotions, but this was completely different, she felt). This Doctor, on the other hand, wanted to do it without her even knowing why.
"Whatever I tell you—whatever you infer from my words—whatever you learn in this meeting, I want you to keep it a secret from me—the me that will be back in approximately forty seven minutes and three seconds, acknowledging that you're right and that this planet is not fun in the deep depths of winter." He took another step closer to her, his expression growing much, much more serious. "I couldn't resist coming back to…well, it doesn't matter, I can't explain why I'm here unless you make me that promise." Now, a slight smile appeared on his lips, the contrast between his expression seconds ago almost as great as the difference between the last Doctor and the current Doctor's accents, Rose thought wryly. Blazing fear ran through this Doctor's eyes like an inferno consuming an entire city; it was plain to see from miles around.
He had a serious reason to be here—and she needed to know it. He might not be her Doctor, at least not now, but he was still the Doctor, and he was a Doctor who knew her.
"Alright," she agreed slowly, regretting it a little the moment she said it—though she agreed with it more than she didn't. The Doctor couldn't know about his future…and whilst she presumed that the only reason she could know was because she was no longer there, she would rather know that the Doctor was alright (or not) than not. She loved the Doctor, and she always would, no matter what face he had or what personality changes he underwent.
In the way only the Doctor could manage, the man before Rose both visibly brightened and became more sorrowful concurrently, her agreement making him both the universe's most happy and the most broken.
"Oh, Rose," he whispered, both conflicting emotions shining through, even in just two words. "You have no idea how much I have wanted to see you, for the longest of times…"
His words could be taken two ways, in Rose's mind: either he was much older than her Doctor, and had lived centuries after her death…or she's going to leave him involuntarily, and he changes in the near future.
"Do I…die soon?" She asked quietly, unable to stop herself. She promised him forever, but what if death brings that forever closer to the present than either of them had ever imagined? "He's always worried that I'm going to be hurt, I can see it in his eyes. Do I die, Doctor, with him—you?"
Slowly, the Doctor shook his head, any semblance of happiness disappearing from his face, his eyes, as he moved. "I can't tell you much about your own future, Rose, you know I can't; I have to obey the Laws of Time every now and then. But I can…I can say that as long as things play out this way, you won't die with me. As for what causes this, you know I—"
"Can't say. Yeah, got it the first time." Rose tried to make her tone flippant, to hide that she had been shaken by his words, but it must have been clear that she had been rocked majorly. Her entire life revolved around visiting different planets, helping the people there change or get rid of a threat to them; it was what she loved to do. Never could she go back to working in Henrik's, or another department store similar to that, not even if the Doctor dropped her off back in her mum's flat. She would always find a way to fly among the stars, though she wanted to do that with the Doctor for the rest of her life. What would—could—happen to make their plans change so drastically?
As though sensing the raging, unstable emotions within Rose—or maybe he just wanted the crowbar out of the equation—the Doctor closed the gap between himself and Rose, throwing the weapon on the floor. She barely noticed, though she did recognise that his hands were much smaller than her Doctor's when he took her hand. It was now he was going to tell her what he came here to say, Rose realised, intuition guiding her to that opinion.
She wasn't wrong.
"I'm dying, Rose," he murmured, barely audible despite their closeness, and immediately, Rose wished he hadn't come, wished she hadn't promised to keep this a secret. How could she keep it from her Doctor that she had met his future dying self? She didn't know what he had came here to say before—or maybe she did, and she was hiding that from herself—but she had never dreamed it would be to say that he was dying; that was why she had agreed to keep it from the Doctor. But now…now her boat had been rocked, her world turned upside down, because the Doctor was dying…and soon, the universe wouldn't have its greatest healer.
Frantically, she moved away from him, shaking her head furiously, realising only as tears dropped onto her hands that she was crying hysterically. Trying to process it was difficult, and it was only with great difficulty that she could move past the word death. "No. No, Doctor, you don't get to do this. You don't get to come and tell me you're dying, and ask me to keep it a secret. You can't; it's not fair!" Worried she was about to start babbling about feelings he probably didn't care about, Rose managed to shut her mouth, though it didn't stop the wave of emotions within her from crashing inside.
A flash of some childish menace burst through the Doctor's eyes, and Rose could feel the difference between the Doctors. They were physically and mentally completely different, the latter only something she could understand now; this one was childish in some aspects, expecting to drop bombshells and for them to be kept a secret. He expected everything his way—because he was broken, broken in a way her Doctor wasn't. He had loved too much and lost too many, all of which turned him into someone who took all the power and expected no contest for it.
"You promised," he replied, a tad of a tantrum clear in his voice.
"You're being a brat," Rose managed to retort through her steadily flowing tears. "You may be dying and you may be alone, but you're still the Doctor—and the Doctor isn't a child. You're far from it."
She stepped back closer to him, took a deep, cleansing breath to force as much hysteria away from herself as possible, and this time, she grabbed his hand rather than the other way around. He seemed surprised at this, but a few seconds of confusion gave way to a smile appearing on his lips—the first genuine one she had seen from him. Blimey. She had thought her Doctor could change emotions quickly; he had nothing on his future self.
"I'm…I didn't mean to hurt you—I would never want that." He told her softly, their eyes locking. Once again, she could see his emotions…but she could also see the burden of centuries of knowledge and loss there, sweeping spirals descending into insanity in his centre. That was wrong. The Doctor never wholly lost control—or she hadn't seen it. And she hoped she never would.
"How are you dying? Can't you just regenerate?" Rose asked gently, far more gently than she had thought herself possible of being. "Or don't you want to do that? And what made you decide to visit just now? If you knew we had this day where we could meet again, why didn't you take it before?"
His shoulders seemed to sag under the questions, and Rose's free hand lifted up to comfort him; his shoulder felt odd, clad in tweed rather than cotton, but she could adjust. She'd had to, after all.
"I don't think it'll be a death that I can regenerate through, no, Rose. My enemies mean to kill me, and kill me they shall, if they succeed. I have been aware of this for a long time—this place, Trenzalore, has haunted me since this incarnation began—and it's impossible to stop them. I have tried and I have tried, even erasing myself from the fabric of the universe, but they still keep coming." He stopped suddenly, looking down at his feet, his hands fiddling with his bowtie, sounding distraught to Rose's ears. "I never visited before, Rose, because this is it! I can never see you again after this; I kept it open as long as possible, for when the end was here. I didn't want to waste it on a meaningless visit. You're the person I wanted to see just before I go there. To Trenzalore."
Rose was stunned into silence for a whole minute as she processed his every word. "You still think about me in the future? I thought you would have moved on?" She found herself unable to answer anything he said besides through another question; she had so, so many, and his answers just left her with even more, things she hadn't even thought about before.
The Doctor smiled ever so slightly wider, a tad of bitterness and regret in the way he held his mouth. Rose was amazed at just how quickly she had picked up ways to see this incarnation's emotions; it wasn't hard though. Different face, same man, after all. "I'm not sure I told you before, but each incarnation's loves and likes usually get pushed away when a new version is born. My former self never had this issue because you remained there through the process, which is unusual. But I've had friends in this body—even a wife, though I'm not entirely sure how that happened—and the loves of my last life are locked away as far as possible, to stop them hurting me."
Rose raised an eyebrow, more than slightly jealous of this mysterious woman who had managed to tie the Doctor down to more than just friendship, more than just dating, but marriage. "What about me, Doctor? Did you not love me enough to lock me away, because here you are, in a TARDIS which isn't going to be yours for a very long time."
"No, no, Rose, you misunderstand me—probably because I forgot to finish, I have a nasty habit of doing that. I locked everyone and everything away, but you never stayed away. I pushed you from my consciousness so that I wouldn't have to look at you and feel everything that has lingered with me, realising how much of an idiot I was for—no, I suppose that doesn't matter." He stopped himself, and Rose wanted nothing more than for him to continue, though she knew he never would. He wouldn't reveal his feelings, even in a self she would never see again, because if she knew something like that for definite…well, she wouldn't be accepting friendship. "Yet no matter how hard I pushed you away, you always came back—and when I heard that my death looms close, I knew that I couldn't put this trip off any longer. I had to see you again before I left, I couldn't stop myself."
A smile slipped onto Rose's lips despite herself, touched that she still meant something to the Doctor in future years. He would always be the man she loved more than any other, and even if he didn't feel exactly the same, especially not in the future, that she was good enough for him to visit in the hours leading up to his end…it touched her more than she thought it would.
"I'm sorry," she said, realising that she hadn't said it before. She truly was sorry; sorry not only for the Doctor but for the universe, and even for herself, because whilst she wouldn't be alive to see the Doctor's end, she knew that wherever she was it would still hurt her. "You know that I am, Doctor, because it'll hurt everyone when you're gone."
Without realising it, somehow he was locked in her embrace and she in his, and as she breathed in his scent, Rose thought she could smell something that had been there for both her Doctors. It was something small, probably a figment of her imagination, but it was something that tied the three of them together—and the three of them with the rest who had came before them: mint. They all had a touch of it in their own personal smell, and smelling it made Rose remember something else that the Doctor had told her before.
"You know something else, Doctor?" She continued, pressing her cheek into his shoulder. Sometime between the revelation and now she had stopped crying, and she tried desperately to keep the tears at bay, to be strong for them both. "Once, you told me that impossible things aren't impossible. We've done impossible things—visiting parallel universes, made Queen Vic smile, saved a small boy from certain death in the Second World war—and that means something else: defeating your enemies is possible."
She knew from his silence and fidgeting that the Doctor was thinking of a way to try and argue with her, so she continued regardless of whatever twisted logic of fate and Time Laws that he usually came out with. "I don't know you in the future, but I know that when you make enemies, it's for a reason. So think about why you angered them as you make your way there, take as much ammunition as you can to fight a peaceful war—the Doctor doesn't fight, he never fights, you're not the Soldier, after all—and make sure you come out of there alive. That Trenzalore place isn't where you're going to be buried; it doesn't sound nice enough for someone as special as you. As long as you leave, it doesn't matter how you do it." Rose paused for a second in her inspirational speech, hoping that the Doctor will listen, willing him to ignore his stubborn inability to take advice in some situations. Then she realised something. "Well, as long as you don't steal someone else's time machine or vortex manipulator or whatever it is people have in your future, so that you don't get yourself another enemy. You need to start playing nicer, Doctor. Enemies aren't nice things to have."
Silence fell, and Rose wondered whether or not this Doctor would listen to her. He had said that he came to see her to tell her something and to see her, not to take advice. She had noticed earlier that he was childish and stubborn in so many ways, and so very old in others, but as he pulled away from her to look at her directly, Rose noticed something else: he was still her Doctor. Despite the personality adjustments and the physical changes, he was still the man she had fallen in love with (and seemingly, someone else had, too) and he would never have come here to just tell her what to do. He wanted her advice, wanted her encouragement, and that was something which made her heart soar to higher heights than ever before. There was still the issue of him going to his death at Trenzalore, and whether or not her words of wisdom (wisdom she didn't think she'd had before she became the big Bad Wolf, but that was just her opinion) helped him she would never know, but she had done her best, and that was all she could do.
"Rose Tyler, I could kiss you right now!" the Doctor exclaimed, a smile brighter than anything she had ever seen before on his face. He could light up as bright as a child on Christmas Day, she realised; maybe it wasn't so bad, being a little childish.
"Okay," she said without missing a heartbeat, because he was her Doctor, and kissing him would be the same as kissing the one out in the marketplace…right? Yet when he started to laugh and pulled her in for yet another hug, muttering things about TARDIS slingshot devices and whether or not the trajectory would be right to fire bananas on daleks, Rose knew that it would never happen. Not because he didn't want it—she didn't know what he wanted, in any incarnation—but because he didn't want to jeopardise his own timeline by doing something that could change an entire stream of events. His own continued existence was essential, and doing too much to change the past could be catastrophic for him.
"I've missed you, Rose, so, so much." The Doctor broke off from muttering about things Rose didn't understand to talking to her, so fast that she barely processed he was indeed talking to her. "Your room's still in the TARDIS—my TARDIS—so if you ever find yourself without a ride and I'm around…"
She smiled and laughed slightly, because if she didn't do that, she'd cry again, and she didn't want the Doctor's last chance to see her being tainted by her tears. "I'll know who to call, I've got the number programmed into my phone."
"Too right you do, that took a lot of effort to get that phone working!" He sounded indignant at the same time as being amused, and Rose was secretly glad that her Doctor wasn't quite so two-emotions-at-the-same-time as this future one was.
"Doctor, it took you and the sonic about thirty seconds to get me to be able to ring my mum millions of years in the past. I sincerely doubt that that's considered a lot of effort on your part."
The mood turned more sombre, the Doctor lost in long ago years, enveloping himself in memories he had probably stored at the very back of his mind to stop them reminding him of things he had lost. What things, Rose didn't know, but she had a nasty feeling the next few months would give her an answer to the question he didn't want to answer.
"I suppose you're right, it was so long ago…I can remember everything so clearly, Rose, but sometimes things I want to remember just fade into the background, and it takes so much effort to bring them back." The Doctor's voice remained soft, his eyes showing Rose that he wasn't with her, not really. He was in some corner of his vast mind, looking through memories and trying to decide if they really did happen like that, or whether it was his memory playing tricks on him, making him think things happened differently to how they did.
They stood together for an immeasurable period of time, staring into the other's face, trying to read it for all evident expressions and feelings; it was difficult for Rose to make out some of the less prominent emotions in the Doctor, but she did it, and she knew that he carried more regret than her Doctor did. Why he regretted, she didn't know—wouldn't know, couldn't know—and she wasn't going to ask.
"The Doctor will be back soon, and you can't—"
"Be here when he gets back, I know, Rose; I just don't want to leave," the Doctor responded, pulling her back in for a full hug. His head rested on her shoulder, and part of her attention was amused at the fact that he was only a tad taller than she was. "You won't ever know the outcome of my trip to Trenzalore, and I'm sorry about that…but I thank you for giving me the hope and support I found myself lacking. You always were my rock, Rose, and I've missed that over the centuries. Thank you, for everything—though please don't tell the past me what you've learnt. It would ruin everything."
A lump appeared in her throat, and she did everything she could to try and make her voice sound normal as she spoke. "It's alright, Doctor. All I want is for you to live and to be happy—and to stop regretting, even just a little bit. Because if you do that…then you'll be happier. All I've ever wanted is for you to be happy."
He didn't say a word in response, simply pulled back and pressed his lips to her cheek softly, so lightly that it barely felt as though he had even done it. "I'll miss you, Rose. Don't forget, the flowers I'm going to bring back in about seven minutes, don't take them to your mother's. You'll thank me for it later."
"Good luck!" she called as he walked down through the console room, running his hand over the console as he passed it, on his way to the door. "And, Doctor…you'll be fine. I can feel it in my heart."
At this, he turned back, a wistful smile on his lips, the future Doctor rejuvenated at least from how he had been when she first met him. "Thank you, Rose. I'll always lo—"
He was gone and the door shut before he finished the sentence.
Unable to help herself, Rose sank down to the floor and curled up in a ball, tears streaming as she thought about everything she had learnt in the past half an hour or so. She wasn't going to be with him forever—or even her version of it—and he was possibly going to die in his very far future. He needed her, just as much as she needed him: that was the only bright spot in the otherwise bleak picture she had just been painted.
He had said her Doctor would be back in seven minutes, so five minutes after he had left, Rose picked herself up and wiped away the tear marks as best she could. He couldn't know, and he had an uncanny knack of being able to find out what made her upset; he'd managed it far too often in the past eighteen months, and she had to be strong this time. For once, the Doctor couldn't know something.
When he burst in through the door less than a minute later, holding a bunch of twigs she presumed were meant to be flowers, he looked startled. "Rose, why are you crying?"
She lifted the copy of the book she had started earlier, having decided this would be the only acceptable cover for the fact she was a quivering mess because the Doctor was (possibly) dying. "I'm only halfway through but it's the most traumatic book ever written, Doctor. I don't know how you did it."
He smiled and moved across for a hug; and as they hugged, Rose noticed the mint more prominently than normal. "I cried at the end, remember, Rose. Now, shall we go and see the queen herself, Joanne Rowling—or do you want to go further afield? Further or closer, forward or backwards—these are the questions that really matter."
No they're not, she thought to herself, though she suppressed it as quickly as possible. Best not think about that. "I don't mind," she replied honestly, still clinging onto him as tightly as possible. "As long as I'm with you, I don't care where we go."
(As she slept that night, somewhere in space and time, the Doctor was regenerating, but Rose didn't know. And she would never find out.)