He was sleeping. It was the first time she'd ever seen him sleep of his own volition. Sure, there had been the occasional alien-spore motivated dream state or the odd psychic attack, but this was different. He was sleeping because he was tired. His human body needed what his Time Lord body never had: rest. His needs were different now. Hers were, too.
He was gone. He was gone and lost to her forever and he was pressed against her all at once. How do you mourn someone you see every day? She'd been here before. Last time he was proper dead, though. He hadn't had a choice. This time...
A week had passed since Dårlig Ulv Stranden. She'd boarded a zeppelin with her mother and her Doctor (who was still calling himself John Smith when asked by anyone) to return to London with its empty flat. She'd been almost embarrassed to show him where she lived.
II
He'd looked around at the white, bare walls, the sparse furniture, the small tele, the ridiculously large radio she'd built from scratch. He looked at the hollow where she spent her nights and she knew he was seeing her lack of commitment to the life she'd made here – her desperate urge to escape.
He hadn't said it, though. He'd given her his best smile and said, "Welcome home, Rose Tyler."
She'd let him wrap his arms around her (warm, not cool as he'd been before). She buried her face in his blue-pinstripe suit, smelling the unfamiliar scent, and found she couldn't cry. She wanted to - desperately she wanted the release of a good cry - but nothing came as the seconds ticked past. She had nothing to give.
He pulled back, then, in more ways than one.
II
He tried to give her space, really he did, but they were always together. What else did he have to do? With an enthusiasm that wasn't quite genuine (she'd learned long ago to see through his cheer), he threw himself into learning about this world, this life.
Her life. The only one she had left.
He asked about doing the dishes, grocery shopping, and paying bills. All things he knew about, in theory, but when she'd pointed that out he'd looked at her like... like he was breaking. Cracks had spread across his facade, rips in the skin of his existence. It was like seeing into the TARDIS. She looked into the Doctor and saw fear.
A joke spilled out to cover the slip, that response was automatic, and he'd grinned in a way that held no laughter. She told him anything and everything he wanted to know. Whatever it took to keep that look at bay. She taught him how to change a vacuum filter and cook an omelet. She tried to teach him to read a map but failed miserably, only in part because she wasn't too keen on maps herself. She explained the postal service and why no amount of effort would ever fix it. The look came again on the fourth day when she asked him what he wanted to try next and he couldn't think of anything locally available
She suggested they go by her mum's for a visit, and then insisted when he said no, and then threatened to take away his refrigerator privileges when he still said no.
While he was pestering Jackie about seeing Tony, Rose asked Pete to get him a clearance. Torchwood delivered it the same night with an invitation to come after hours right away if he was so inclined.
They couldn't get enough of him. Their very own Time Lord, whom they unfortunately couldn't lock away in a lab thanks to his influential and staunchly opposed family members. Officially, he was a Tyler now. It was easier that way to protect him.
John Tyler went on record as Rose Tyler's husband. Yes, they probably should have mentioned him before. No, they didn't care if that made a headache for the department. Yes, everyone in the admin shop could shove it up any and all available orfices.
The Doctor looked at the badge for a solid minute and then looked at her, his eyes flicking back and forth with a thousand questions burning between them. She looked away.
II
Going through the warehouses to search for anything useful seemed to interest him, but now and again she caught him staring at her like a lost child. She wouldn't meet his eyes. How could she? She had no answer.
By the end of the fifth day he started bringing things back to the flat to work on. She watched him fiddling with a blue cube, his brows furrowed in concentration, and felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. That was the closest she'd come to crying, watching him do the same things he'd always done with about the same amount of success, but she couldn't let the tears fall - she couldn't - so she went to the kitchen and made tea and absolutely refused to consider that she was turning into her mum. Tea was not the solution for everything, it just so happened that this occasion was vastly improved by it and suggesting otherwise was an invitation to be maimed.
By the time she'd won that argument with herself and made two unspilled cups he'd managed to turn one side of the cube green.
"Look, Rose, this thing's brilliant. It's empathic." He looked up at her with a real smile, a proper grin, and she felt one spread across her own face. The Doctor's joy was like that: infectious. She reached out to take the device and it turned blue again. Withdrawn, just like her.
She tried not to see the pain in his eyes. "Must not like me," she said softly.
The Doctor shrugged. "Probably not working right yet." But his eyes were still on her, still asking those questions. Still lost. Just like the other Doctor.
She looked away. "I made tea. Do you want some?"
He swallowed thickly. Nodded. "Yeah, sounds great."
That night she fell asleep on the couch and woke to find him already gone. He'd taken the cube with him.
II
The sixth day he brought home a box full of random scrap and set to work constructing something. He'd come in making pleasant chatter and kept the litany up as he fiddled with different bits, explaining what he was doing. She tuned him out, but not as much as she used to. She worked for Torchwood now. When he talked about magnetic bindings and auxiliary resonances she understood half of it. Part way through she realized he was trying to make a new screwdriver and that was it.
"... don't have all the same parts but I can probably get it working." He realized she was staring at him this time. "What?"
The tears poured out of her without warning; heavy, hot tears she couldn't stop or control. He literally dropped everything to come hold her. That was new, the Doctor dropping everything for her. And if his arms were warm instead of cool she clung to him anyway. If his smell was unfamiliar it was also undeniably him. He was here. He was here in her arms and she was never going to see him again.
She cried until she had nothing left to cry while he held her, and rocked her, and stroked her hair. He whispered, "It's okay. It's all right. I know you miss him. I know."
Somehow his acknowledgement was the worst part.
When she kissed him then it was a real kiss, one she chose to give instead of something wrenched out of her by pain and loneliness. She felt him offering himself up to her, giving her all of him. She felt paltry and small when she offered what was left of herself. Heart, soul, everything.
In a fumbling and a discovery that was strange to both of them, they started something new. His skin was paper-thin, barely covering his bones. His hands on her were strange, urgent in a way they never had been. On the couch and with an all too human awkwardness they came together for the first time.
II
She lay with her head on his chest feeling his heart beat. Just the one now. One heart. One life. Her Doctor. Somewhere the Doctor was out there in his TARDIS, alone with his companions. He hadn't let her stay, hadn't let her help him. She saw his face as he'd been in the street when he spotted her.
The shock, the disbelief, the hope clawing its way up from the depths as he took her in. And then they'd been running, and the look on his face broke her heart to think of. How could she be happy knowing his pain? Feigning a shiver, she pulled the blanket off the back of the couch to cover them, bundling a handful up in her fist. The tears fell into it rather than onto her Doctor. If he noticed, he didn't say anything. Maybe he really did understand.
For the first time since she was little, she cried herself to sleep. She dreamed she was back on the beach, and this time when she asked him to finish his sentence he did, and she ran to the TARDIS with him but at the doorway she saw the human Doctor's face, and it was the face of a man who'd lost everything. She woke in the dark, expecting him to have gotten up and surprised to feel him still beside her. Her arm was numb from being pinned beneath her body, and when she lifted her head she was shocked to see his eyes closed.
Her first thought was that the Doctor didn't sleep, hadn't slept since they'd come back. She'd just expected him to go on as he always had, not sleeping, because that was the way things were. The Doctor didn't sleep, but this wasn't the same Doctor. He had the same face, and the same shape, but as she watched him she realized he was different. They were different. This situation was definitely different. She'd never before had to consider getting up without disturbing him.
She extracted herself with some difficulty, but managed not to wake him. Her clothes were scattered on the floor amidst his. It was hard to tell which were hers in the dark. When she picked up the nearest pair of trousers something tumbled out of the pocket. The cube.
It glowed softly blue, enough light to find her clothes by. Now dressed, she picked it up as she crossed the room, expecting it to go dull at her touch, but it didn't. Instead it glowed a little more brightly, still blue, but not dark as it had been the last time she'd reached for it. Pulsing gently, she felt somehow as if the cube understood. She carried it with her over to the Doctor's abandoned work.
Possibly it was the most random collection of materials she'd ever seen. Wires of all types, thicknesses, and conductivity including a few she was positive came from a Slitheen ship. A tachyon condenser. A fragment of the Nimon's horn. God only knew how that had made it to Earth. There was even a tiny lense of Atraxi crystal. Most of it she couldn't think what to do with, but at the bottom of his box she found a Chelonian circuit board, and that was something she could use.
The cube whirled a gray color through the blue.
Feeling only a little silly, Rose asked, "You want to know what I'm doing?" The cube didn't change. "Um... oh, let's see." She concentrated and tried to think of the Doctor smiling, tried to project it to the device. The gray subsided but she didn't think she'd gotten anything through. Something to tinker with later. When had she started tinkering?
At nearly six, she had the pleasure of watching him wake for the first time. He drew in a deep breath, held it for three seconds, and let it go. At the end of the breath he opened his eyes, immediately glancing down to where she'd been. The hurt was unmistakable, but under it was something much worse: resignation. He'd expected her to be gone.
Maybe that was why she took a perverse enjoyment out of startling him. "My arm fell asleep," she said with a slow smile. "Didn't want to wake you fidgeting, so I got up."
He froze. His eyes locked on her with the same reluctant hope she'd seen in Cardiff on the other's face. It was the look of a man who can't bear to believe what he's seeing because if he does and it isn't real he might not survive it. The fear at war with the reality. He looked at her and she saw her power to destroy.
The pain welled up again because she did that. Her. Her actions. Not circumstance or fate but her and her selfish pain. This was the man who kissed a time vortex out of her. The man who had saved her over and over again, beyond counting. He had opened her eyes to the universe and all he'd had to say was, "Run." He was the Doctor.
She looked down at her handiwork - away from her handiwork. "I made you a translation circuit," she said, but her voice cracked. And then his hands were on her and his mouth tasted like her tears.
II
On the seventh day, they talked. Not with words, at first. Some things were already understood. He knew she still ached for him, his other self. She knew she would have to let go of the Doctor she couldn't save. She even understood that she had already begun to do so, but she wasn't ready to deal with that completely. Not yet. Not so soon.
Think of it, her inmost self whispered, as an alternate timeline. Somewhere you are also with the other. It did not make her feel better, because even in that timeline she still abandoned a Doctor. She wanted to save them both.
She'd never told him about that voice, the part that remembered more than she let on. The Bad Wolf. The TARDIS. Time. She'd never quite decided which it was, or if it was only one. Maybe there was no difference. The Doctor might know, if she asked him. Something new they had in common: they'd both once tapped a deeper well. Metaphysically speaking, anyway.
His fingers traced lazy patterns across her stomach between her hips, the movements dangerously close to a caress.
"So I'm a Tyler now," he said softly. It was a statement, but she heard the question in it.
"If you like. I can't say I'm too partial to being a Smith."
"Oi! What's wrong with Smith?" he asked. His voice was all Donna.
Rose shrugged. "Nothing's wrong with it, I guess. I've just always been a Tyler. Sort of figured you might like to join the family."
He put on an expression of mock fear. "Well, can't say as I fancy being Jackie's son-in-law, even if she does like this body better."
"Best watch out she doesn't hear you. She might tell Torchwood you're not related." It was a joke, but it wasn't. Torchwood would probably like nothing better than to toss him away in a cell somewhere and vivisect him when the urge arose.
The Doctor propped himself up on an elbow to look at her. "Are you sure that's what you want? Because it doesn't have to be."
She thought about it for a moment. Being here, living with him but without the sex. Just friends. Flatmates. She discarded it even as she considered. They'd gone too far for that. She ripped a hole in the universe to get back to him - another version of him. He destroyed an entire race to save it. She looked at him, smiling because his hair was even more uncontrollable than usual. "It's what I want. But what do you want?"
His eyes took on a mischievous glint. "I have been thinking of restarting my old sock collection."
"Just as long as you don't leave them lying about on the floor you can collect a dresser full."
He leaned in to kiss her, long and soft before he pulled back. "Thank you," he whispered.
She brought her arm up to encircle his waist. "Welcome home."