AN: I was picking through the notes on my phone, making some room, when I discovered this - a complete ficlet that I never posted O_O. Probably written sometime two years ago. I only edited the punctuation a bit, since that was trickier to do on the phone.
Rose?
'Who's Rose!' Amy asked out of the blue. She didn't expect the Doctor to hit his head against the TARDIS console he was working under. She definitely didn't expect the confusion on his face as he scrambled to his feet, nor the suspicion in his voice.
'How do you know about Rose?'
'You told me. Sort of...'
The Doctor raised an eyebrow.
'Look, I was nosing through the TARDIS' archive and I ran into all these pictures of this Rose girl and, well, you. Only it wasn't you-you, just one of the yous you usually show people when you go around impressing people. Though I think there were two yous, come to think of it… By the way, those ears?! Huge! Good thing you got rid of them.'
The Doctor listened in silence, not sure where to start. It was just like Amy to bring stuff like this up so casually. 'How'd you get into the archive again?' he eventually asked.
Amy waved it aside. 'When's that ever stopped me before?'
He considered it for a moment and dropped the question – he didn't really want to know how she broke into the archive this time.
'Well, Doctor? Spill!' she insisted.
'Rose was a very long time ago,' he finally confided. Too long a time, he thought with a sigh.
'And she was...' Amy prompted.
The Doctor frowned, looking for the best way to put this. 'You know how I... Change...' he hesitated.
Amy nodded. 'I've seen the pictures. You still owe me that story!'
'When I come close to death, my body changes. It does anything it takes to keep me alive, even if that means it needs to change completely. I change.'
'Eleven times so far,' Amy chimed in.
'Well, I don't usually get to warn my companions of this ahead of time. I don't want you to think I take death lightly – I don't, it's just as scary going through it once as it is ten times. I'm still scared.'
Amy set her hand lightly on his. She wished she could say she understood, but she could barely imagine facing death once.
'Rose was the first person in centuries I allowed myself to love. I don't really know how it happened – she was one of the best and the worse things about that life. And then I just lost her.'
Amy thought back on when she lost Rory and how it hurt even if she had forgotten him.
'The best part about regenerating was that I wasn't the man that loved her anymore. She's still out there with me, just not with me-me. Long story.'
Amy nodded and quietly went back to what she's been doing.