Preface: Playing in Auntie Beeb's sandbox.
He's too dangerous... he needs you... I'm him...
The Doctor's words echoed through Rose's mind, reducing Jackie's frenzied mobile chatter to background noise.
I look like him. Rose couldn't deny that this man, the Doctor's clone with one heart, one life, and no chance at regeneration, looked exactly like the man who'd dematerialised half an hour before, leaving Rose and Jackie stranded on a Norwegian beach with the one-heart wonder. And not just any Norwegian beach, either. No, the Doctor and Donna Noble had left them on the sands of Bad Wolf Bay, the one place on this Earth Rose genuinely hated.
I think like him. Same thoughts, same memories. That, however, Rose didn't believe. The man currently sitting on a rock, staring out across the ocean, did not have the same thoughts as the Doctor who'd left her behind for the last time. She'd believe that they had the same memories, but this monocardiac clone had killed an entire Dalek empire, something the fully-Time-Lord Doctor would never have done; even as the Daleks were falling into nothing, the real Doctor had run back, had tried to save Davros.
No, this wasn't the same man. He had a different body—similar on the outside, but ordinarily human on the inside—and a different mind. He'd taken the Doctor's memories, copied them into his own head, but he wasn't the same.
Even now, Rose could see it. He committed genocide... He'd done something the Doctor—her Doctor—would never have done, even if it meant letting a few Dalek ships escape and terrorise worlds again. This was the man Davros had named Destroyer of Worlds. That—the one who'd just left—was the man who'd tried to save the creator of his worst enemies.
Rose turned away from the waves to face the man on the rock. He looked at her, but neither of them said a word.
"Rose!" Jackie called, waving her phone. "Rose, honey! Your dad's sending a chopper out for us. He said they should be here in fifteen minutes, and then we'll take the zeppelin back to London in the morning."
Rose just nodded. Torchwood was sending a helicopter. They'd have a field day when she got back to London. She was sure they'd been gone longer than she felt they had, and there was the matter of the man in front of her. He was literally no-one. He had no identity.
She sighed and sat down on a rock next to him, facing him. "I hate this place," she said. "Last time I was here, I died."
He looked at her and sighed, but he didn't seem to be able to say anything.
"I don't even think it exists in the other world. Know what that means?"
He shook his head. "No," he replied quietly.
Rose felt tears burning in her eyes as she put voice to it, gave life to a theory she'd never said before. "It means that when I looked into the vortex—when I became the Bad Wolf—I knew I'd come here. I knew I'd be stuck here, in this reality." She rubbed her face with her sleeve, wiping away the tears. "That's why Jackie and Pete never had a daughter here. The Bad Wolf never let them, so there would never be two Rose Tylers. Nobody would have to choose between two versions of Rose. Nobody would have to die." She blotted her eyes with her sleeve and sniffled. "I'm the Bad Wolf. I create myself." She laughed a little. "I bet I even saw me, stranded on this godforsaken stretch of sand with my mum and the one-heart wonder, who got unceremoniously dumped in another universe with nothing but his trainers and a silly blue suit."
He shook his head. "He didn't leave me with nothing. I've got the brains, remember?"
"Right."
Jackie approached them then, finally detached from her mobile. "Pete's having the guest room made up for you for now, Doctor. Torchwood's gonna have a field day, he says."
"I'm sure they are," the Doctor-clone replied. Rose knew that look: he wasn't really paying much attention to whatever was going on outside his head. For once in her life, Rose didn't feel compelled to try to bring him back to reality. He still wore a far-away expression as the chopper came over the cliffs nearby and landed on the beach, whipping the sea breeze into a chill wind. Rose had to cover her eyes to keep the sand out.
On the way to the hotel, Rose and the clone were silent. Jackie chatted away on her mobile. Rose thought she might be talking to Pete, or to one of the staff, since they seemed to be discussing Tony. Fifteen minutes of watching the landscape fly by, the chopper executed a smooth, near-perfect landing on a tall building in the middle of the city. Once the blades stopped spinning, Jackie shooed them into the building, where a tall, balding butler showed them to their rooms.
Rose sat on the bed in the room she was sharing with her mother (the Doctor-clone had been given the next room to himself). "I'm gonna have a shower. You should get some rest, sweetheart. I know how you don't sleep well on planes."
"In a bit," she said vaguely. She didn't mention that the concept of sleeping well had been foreign to her for a while now. She looked at the clock. It was nearing seven o'clock local time. "I'm going for a walk."
"I'll order room service, yeah?"
"Sure." Rose gave her mum a forced half-smile and walked out of the room. She knew this hotel well enough—she'd stayed here last time they'd been to the Bay—and her feet took her out to the balcony she'd spent almost three days on, the one that overlooked the city and, beyond it, the ocean.
Rose was only half-surprised to see him standing there, looking out over the city with that spaced-out expression. She stood next to him, watching clouds roll in from the ocean.
"D—Doc—I can't do it," she said.
"I don't need a babysitter," he said immediately.
"That's not what I meant," she replied quickly. "I can't call you... It's his name. You're not him."
"Right," he said tersely.
"What am I going to call you, then?"
He shrugged.
Rose knew he was bristling at having to be called something other than simply 'Doctor'. "Look, it's not like you're going to be saving the universe anyway. The Doctor doesn't exist in this universe. We deal with our problems on our own."
He just looked at her for a minute, then turned back to the city. He said nothing.
"I'll be in my room. Don't do anything stupid." She turned and left before he could ask what she meant. It was still too soon to go back to her room, so she wandered to some other balcony with some other view and stood looking out over some other part of the city until it started to rain and she figured it was probably time to go back and suffer through a few hours of sleep.