He knew where he was the moment he opened the TARDIS door and saw the zeppelins in the sky. Pete's world for sure, and his ship had navigated the impossible distance without so much as a wobble. The zeppelins were more modern, and although it was impossible to tell because the universes aged at different rates, he had to be a good sixty or seventy years into the future. This world's future.
Rose's future.
The TARDIS had materialized on a sweeping lawn outside a tasteful brick building, and glancing up at the sign above the entrance, he was pretty sure he knew why she had landed here, the reason he had come.
At the nurses' station just inside the door he paused a moment, and cleared his throat. The nurse looked up expectantly, and he stammered. "I—I'm here to visit Rose…" he faltered some more, trying to imagine what his duplicate had chosen for a surname. "Er, Smith?"
"Do you mean Mrs. Tyler?" the nurse offered. Of course; he'd taken her name when they married, having had no attachment to his own, a pseudonym anyway.
"Yes. Yeah," he said around the lump in his throat. "Rose Tyler."
"Sweet thing," the nurse said with a smile. "Such a tender soul. Her son was here for a bit earlier today, and her daughter yesterday, but they've slipped out for a time. She should be on her own."
He hesitated. "Husband?"
"Daniel died a couple of years ago. That's when they brought her here. She's been a bit lost without him, although she always says he'd have been much worse off without her."
Oh yes. He knew that well enough.
The nurse walked him down the hall to a corner room, spacious and sunny, and suitably cluttered with flowers and pictures and bright decorations.
She was in the bed, propped up at a slight angle. Her skin was papery and nearly translucent, gathered in creases around her mouth and her closed eyes. Slanting sunlight fell across the blankets, and her face was slightly turned toward the window as if she'd dozed while catching the bright warmth. He crossed to the bed and sat down on an edge, gathering one hand between both of his. She was cool to his touch, cooler than he remembered, and the flesh was fragile and wrinkled, so very different from the thousands of times he'd held her hand, so frail, so broken. Just as he had always known, as he had told her.
You whither and you die. Imagine watching that happen…
Or imagine missing it, seeing only the effects, seeing only the end. Worse, so much worse.
Her eyelids fluttered, opened. Warm brown eyes, milky with cataracts, but alert, fixed on his.
"Daniel?"
She must be more senile than he thought, to confuse him for her husband. He hadn't looked like him in lifetimes, although he was sure his eyes, hazel-green now beneath his (finally!) ginger fringe, were ancient and haunting. Perhaps that's what she recognized.
His throat was impossibly dry, but he forced the words out. "No sweetheart. He's been gone for a while now. It's just me, just…"
"Doctor," she breathed. "You came." A smile spread across her lips, and although partly toothless and distorted with wrinkles, he knew it instantly. Her smile, reaching to her eyes, reaching it seemed to the tips of her toes, reaching deep into his chest, to a place no one had touched in years, eons.
His smile rivaled hers, and he laughed, clear and bright and joyful, although his eyes stung with tears. "Rose Tyler!" he exclaimed, "At last!"
"So young," she said in awe, and pulled an almost childlike pout. "And so not fair."
"I'm sorry, sweetheart." And the moment he said it, he was consumed by it, his sorrow, his guilt, his shame. "So very, very sorry." The tears spilled out of the corners of his eyes, dotting the front of his jacket.
"What for?" she asked, pinning him with her swimming eyes. "Doctor, why are you sorry?"
"For everything, Rose! The whole bloody thing! For losing you, leaving you. For stealing your life, mangling it, destroying it. For never giving you what you needed, what you gave me."
She was shaking her head. "No, you silly man," she breathed. "There's nothing to be sorry for."
"Of course there is, Rose. I—"
"And you call us apes stupid," she said with a smile. "Don't apologize, Doctor. I have no regrets. I wouldn't trade a moment of it."
That had to be a lie. He knew it, called her on it. "Canary Wharf?"
But she shook her head. "Not. A moment. It's all part of it, part of knowing you, traveling with you, saving the Universe a time or two, and Daniel and my children and my grandchildren. My life." She drew a breath. "Not a moment of it, Doctor."
So different. Because there were hundreds of thousands of moments he'd trade. Every single missed opportunity he regretted: not taking her hand more often, not kissing her sweetly, tenderly, forcefully, not making love to her on the floor of the TARDIS control room—or anywhere else, for that matter—like he'd so often imagined, not showing her every star she could see, and several more she couldn't fathom. He regretted holding back, denying, bottling, all the tenderness and fear and vulnerability that came crashing down on him the moment he saw her disintegrated before his eyes on the game show soundstage. He regretted the times he'd sent her away, to Earth in the TARDIS, to this world against her will, home again with the only piece of himself he dared to give her, and that he'd never told her what it meant for her to come back, time and time again, to choose to be with him. He regretted not lashing her to the handle of the clamp, not ripping the fabric of the dual universes to get back to her. He regretted speaking too slowly for once on the beach, and that he hadn't finished the sentence the moment he'd seen her again.
But all he said was, "I'm sorry. Sorry I never told you what you had the right to hear. I love you, Rose Tyler. Love you with all my heart. Both of them in fact. Pretending not to didn't make it any easier, and it was selfish of me to think so. I love you, and I was a right arse for not saying it."
She lifted her face and pressed her cracked lips to his, briefly. "Doesn't need saying," she whispered. "I knew. I always knew."
She let her head fall against his chest, nestling in the hollow of his shoulder, and he shifted on the bed to hold her better, leaning back against the pillow and stretching his body out beside hers. He rested his cheek against the top of her head, and listened to her breath whistling through her lips.
Softly, quietly, she began to speak, telling him story after story of what he'd missed. Her wedding day, the dress like sugared candy, and the groom in his tux—she'd made him wear his glasses. Her job at Torchwood, and a couple of cases where she'd hunted down dangerous aliens, facing death and injury and devastation, or realizing halfway in that the threat was idle and foolish. Moments of joy and humor, the time Daniel had gotten himself stuck in an actual police call box, convinced he could wire it into a time machine if he could only fuse the molecules to create the space he needed inside. The birth of her daughter, watching Daniel hold her, and the wonder spread across his face. Her son a few years later, pulling at her hair as the blond started to fade strand by strand into a gentle, wispy white.
She talked until her voice grew hoarse, until her breath was shallow, until she couldn't go on. And then he picked up, regaling her with stories of travel, of planets and galaxies and species unknown, of River and learning to love again, of companions cherished and gone, of adventures and laughter and tears.
He told her some of his favorite stories, two years worth, a blink in the millennial span of his lifetime, stories of danger and humor and tenderness, of her hand in his.
"Not long now, I think, Doctor," she said softly. "Will you stay?"
"Of course, love. Forever."
She huffed a little laugh. "Forever," she echoed, "well, I tried… anyway."
"And no regrets?" he asked again, "nothing you would change?"
"Nothing," she whispered, "because it would mean… changing who I am. I am," she breathed roughly now, "me… because of you."
He kissed her forehead, the hairline at the tip of her brow, clammy with the labor her breathing.
"Rose," he managed.
"Thank you," she breathed. "Doctor."
He held her for hours.
He held her while her body convulsed, struggling to draw breath again and again, when it seemed it couldn't do it any more, but fought on, the tears splashing down his checks and into her thin hair. He held her while she wheezed and rattled, her limbs twitching, cold against his searing doubly-blood-warmed flesh. He held her while she sighed and relaxed, muscles slack, hardening, cooling. He breathed in the last time she exhaled, hoping to hold the breath inside himself, somehow prolong it, keep it, save it. And he held her long after that breath, and the next one that didn't come, her body a shell in his arms, cold and vacant, a memory.
He tried then to regret it all, to wish away knowing and loving her, to make the years with her fade to spare himself the rest—all the rest, too many to count, the years without Rose.
He'd lost Rose Tyler three times before: at the controls of the ghost machine in Torchwood, their screams mingling as she spiraled toward the void, and twice on the Norwegian beach, salty wind pulling salty tears across her face. And now. And in all that time he'd told himself there might be a way to make it hurt less, if only he hadn't loved her, hadn't let her love him, hadn't brought her into his ship, his life. If only he'd changed some of those moments, those regrets, made them other, or not at all.
But in this, his Rose was right, because the only thing he never regretted was taking her hand in the basement of her shop, pulling her after him, inviting her aboard the TARDIS. It might have saved them both all the pain that it seemed the two universes could contain, but he couldn't bring himself to regret that. Not ever.