A blonde girl sat beside an old, dark-skinned man on a bed. The old man was dying, at the age of ninety-six.
"Mickey… please don't leave me… You're all I have left!" the blonde girl sobbed.
"No, I'm not. The Doctor will find you. I know he will," Mickey replied. The blonde girl looked into his eyes with her own red and puffy ones.
"How do you know that, though?"
Mickey smiled a bit. "The Doctor always finds a way, Rose. He will find a way." His eyes started to close.
"NO! Mickey!" Rose screamed.
"I love you, Rose. Be a good girl when I'm gone." Mickey smiled, and closed his eyes completely. Rose could no longer sense his heartbeat; he was gone.
"I love you too, Mickey," Rose whispered, and kissed the old man's cheek. It was already starting to cool.
She sat up, wiping her face with her sleeve. Mickey had been the last of the humans she'd loved; her mother had died a few years ago, her brother and father had died in the war about fifty years ago, and now Mickey was gone. Rose had outlived all of them, and hadn't aged a day since she was twenty.
Rose stayed in the room for a while, even after her best friend's body had been taken. Her tears had stopped long ago, when she realized she'd have to move on pretty quickly. Her eyes weren't even red anymore.
All of a sudden, she heard a sound. Vwoooorp! Vwoooorp! Her eyes widened. She hadn't heard that sound in seventy-one years! She whipped around, just in time to see a small blue wooden police box materializing in the small room.
A man with big ears and blue eyes came out of the TARDIS. He noticed her. "Hello, I'm looking for a 'Bad Wolf', d'ya know anyone or anything that goes by that name?"
Rose jumped on her feet. "Oh my God… You're the Doctor from this universe…!"
The Doctor from the current dimension raised an eyebrow. "I'm sorry—who are you?"
"Oh… you won't know me. I—I'm from a parallel universe, one where Daleks and Cybermen almost took over the world." She wiped a tear or two from her face. "Oh, and I'm Rose. Rose Tyler."
"Parallel universe? That's not possible!" the Doctor from the current dimension exclaimed. "You can't just travel through different universes…"
Rose laughed humorlessly. "That's exactly what my Doctor said…"
"This is fantastic… someone from a parallel universe! How do you know me… or, me from a parallel universe?"
"I traveled with him," Rose replied. "Oh, that was so long ago…" she said wistfully.
"Why?" he asked curiously.
"He was lonely. It was only him and his TARDIS."
"Didn't he have friends?"
"No, unless you count me," she replied.
The Doctor from the current dimension thought for a bit. "Was he exiled from Gallifrey or something?"
Rose's eyes widened. "D-d'ya know what the Time War is?"
"Of course! It was between the Time Lords and the Daleks, and we destroyed them, committing genocide…"
"Oh my God…" Rose mumbled. "In my universe, the Daleks and Time Lords destroyed each other, leaving the Doctor the last of his kind and the Daleks extinct."
"You're kidding!" the Doctor from the current dimension stared at her, in shock. She shook her head.
"He's so lonely… With no one out there like him…" Rose stared at nothing, not completely focused. "Like me…"
The Doctor from the current dimension cleared his throat a bit awkwardly. "Oh, yeah, the reason I came here was because something that called themselves 'Bad Wolf' sent out a signal for help, and I picked it up on the TARDIS."
Rose looked up at him, confused. "But… I'm the Bad Wolf. I don't have the resources to do something like that, since I quit Torchwood…" Rose tried to think of some reason, but couldn't.
"Maybe there's something special about you…" He took out his sonic screwdriver. "Mind if I…?" he asked.
She shook her head. "Not at all." He pushed the button of the sonic, causing it to buzz and the blue light to turn on. He waved it up and down her body, and his eyes widened.
"Rose… how old are you?" he asked tentatively.
Rose counted on her fingers. "Eight—no—ninety-two. Is that right? Yes."
"I knew it!" he exclaimed. "That's the only explanation!"
"I sensed them, but I thought it was a baby or something," he mumbled. Louder, he said, "Rose, you have two hearts."
Rose's eyes widened. "B-b-but, that's not possible… I'm a human! Last time I went to a doctor, I had one heart! One! Not two!"
"When was the last time you saw a doctor?" he asked.
"Somewhere around seventy years ago…" she replied, sounding defeated.
"Did you know that seventy years is plenty of time for a heart to grow?" he didn't wait for an answer. "Well of course you do! Humans some humans even die of old age when they're in their seventies… But not you."
"Why would I have two hearts?" she asked desperately.
He ignored her question. "Try to remember if anything strange happened to you, most likely during your time with the other me? I know it'll be hard to remember stuff from that long ago… please just try."
Rose imagined a filing cabinet in her mind. She figured out how to do this by herself to remember things that happened long ago. She imagined searching through the files, each labeled years and months, until she got to her time with the Doctor.
She found a fuzzy memory, one where she'd been with Mickey and her mum. Her mum was in a huge machine that was connected to the center of the TARDIS with a rope. They'd been trying to pull it up, like a lid.
It had opened, exactly like a lid. There was a white light, it was so bright, that it hurt her eyes. Wait, no, something else was hurting her eyes. She was absorbing something!
Vwoooorp! Vwoooorp! She vaguely heard the TARDIS dematerializing and rematerializing somewhere else. She walked out of the TARDIS, into a room with Daleks, so many Daleks. It was extremely fuzzy now; she couldn't understand what anyone was saying. The Daleks were turning to dust. She became weak. The Doctor ran over to her, the old one. She thought he said something about Time Vortex and that it was killing her. Her head was hurting really badly, getting worse by the second.
Suddenly, she felt something being absorbed from her, taking the pain away. The Doctor was kissing her to take the power out of her! She felt some of the power go into him and most of it hiding its self inside the depths of her body.
Rose gasped as she came out of her trance-like state, finding herself face-to-face with the other Doctor.
"Find anything?" he asked her softly.
"I-I looked into the heart of the TARDIS and saw the Time Vortex… It was beautiful…" she whispered, still not completely there.
The other Doctor widened his eyes in shock. "And you lived?"
"The Doctor kissed me and absorbed it—well—most of it—most of it hid. Inside me. I felt it. How…how did I not remember something like this?"
The other doctor didn't answer her; he was processing what she'd said. "You looked into the heart of the other me's TARDIS, you grew another heart, you don't age, you traveled through the void into a parallel universe, you sent a signal through time and space… you are an incredible woman, Rose Tyler. You're fantastic." He beamed.
"Traveling with the Doctor does that to you," Rose smiled a bit. Her eyes suddenly widened in shock and realization. "Time Lords have two hearts!"
"I was getting to that…" he said. "Rose, you're a Time Lord."
"Oh my God…" Rose whispered. Tears sprung in her eyes.
The other Doctor turned around and started fiddling with the other TARDIS's controls. "You have a strong link to the TARDIS. Well, your TARDIS. If I can find even the tiniest crack in the universe, I should be able to get us through with that link."
"Are you kidding?!" Rose exclaimed.
"Nope. Let's see, if I just do this, and hit this…" a radar popped up on the viewing screen. "This'll look for any and all cracks in the universe, no matter how small." He sat back and relaxed. Suddenly, the TARDIS lurched, and flung the two on the floor.
"Hold on a second, what happened?" the other Doctor got up and ran over to the doors of the TARDIS. He opened them a crack. He slammed it shut, and opened it again, this time wider. "No way…"
Rose got up. "What?" she went over to him and the door, peeking out herself. It was snowing, and there were Christmas lights everywhere. And a few meters away sat… a second TARDIS!
Rose charged past the other Doctor and to the other TARDIS. She took out her key and inserted it into the lock, turning it. The door clicked softly and opened.
A man with brown hair that stood up in all sorts of places was a sobbing mess. He held a picture in a simple brown frame, a picture of a blonde female human with brown eyes. He'd just dropped off a ginger woman named Donna that had declined his offer to travel with him. Now that he'd finally had time to stop and think, he let out all of his emotions at once.
"Oh, Rose," he whispered, tears rolling down his face and onto the picture. She said she'd travel with him forever, but she was wrong.
"D-Doctor?" a tentative voice said softly from behind him. He hesitantly turned around, thinking that he was probably hallucinating.
Standing there, by the door, was the same girl in the picture in his hand, but her eyes were much older, there was much more wisdom in them than there had been in the girl he'd left at Dårlig Ulv Stranden.
"R-Rose?" his voice was begging for this not to be a hallucination. Rose walked over to him slowly, hesitantly, fearfully.
She took her hand and cupped his face with it, feeling his sideburns. The Doctor then knew she was, in fact, real, and not an image his mind had created. He pulled her into a bone-crushing hug. She hugged back just as forcefully.
"Oh my God, Rose… You're here…" he whispered.
"Yeah, finally." She sniffled. "I can't believe how long it's been, and I don't even know what to say."
It was then that the Doctor felt two heartbeats coming from her. "Rose…" he started. "Are you pregnant?"
That made almost made Rose lose control and burst into tears. She came out of the tight embrace. "Do you want me to tell you what has happened since the battle at Canary Wharf?" she asked.
The Doctor nodded. He could more time has passed by for her than him, but she still looked 20, so probably not that much.
Rose took a deep breath. "Mum, Dad, Mickey and I got a house in Norway. We all lived together for a time, but when my brother was born, Mickey moved out and got married to a girl he'd met a while ago."
"What is your brother's name?" he interjected, not being able to help himself.
"John Smith Tyler." She smiled sadly. "There was a war. It was between the Motharians, Sontarans, Slitheen, and us. We formed an alliance with the Motharians. They were like moths, they were.
"That lasted several years, ending when the Sontarans committed genocide. They blew up Raxacoricofallapatorius and all the Slitheen with it, but they blew up themselves, too. They weren't afraid of dying, because they cared more about honor.
"D-Dad and J-John," she stuttered. "Th-they died in the war. John was only nineteen; he didn't even have a girlfriend." Tears threatened to come down her face. "The Sontarans blew up a Motharian ship that Dad and John were on.
"Mum died when she was eighty, had a heart attack. Mickey had children. Twins, a girl and a boy. When they were little they called me Aunty Rosie." She smiled a bit. But then it disappeared. "When they were five, Mickey's wife drove off with them. He never found them, though.
"B-before I came here, Mickey had died, at the age of ninety-six. He died peacefully, unlike everyone else did." Her voice cracked at the last few words as she burst into tears.
When she calmed down a bit, she continued. "The other Doctor, the one from that dimension, he found me. Apparently I had sent out a signal for help that his TARDIS picked up. He hasn't regenerated, like you have. Probably because I caused it, and I wasn't there.
"I told him that I had looked into the heart of the TARDIS, and he told me I have a strong bond with her because of it. He was able to get the TARDIS through. And, in result, we came here." She breathed in a sigh, finally finished. "Oh, and to answer your question, I'm not pregnant."
The Doctor's time Lord mind was working furiously to process all of the information. He came to one conclusion. "You are not twenty."
Rose shook her head. "No. I'm ninety-two."
The Doctor took out a stethoscope and put it to her heart, listening to it beat. He hesitantly put it to her left side, and heard a second beat. "No… You're not…" he put the stethoscope away and looked at her seriously. She looked at him with the same expression. They were staring at each other like Weeping Angels.
"Doctor, I am a Time Lord," she whispered, making it reality.
He pulled her into a hug. "I am sorry, I am so, so sorry. You could have grown old with your family, but instead you had to watch them die. Everything is my fault. The Time Vortex did this to you."
"But if I had grown old and died, I would've never seen you again," she said. "Everyone but Mickey died of other things, anyway." A couple tears ran down her face onto the Doctor's shoulder.
The Doctor stroked her hair comfortingly. He pulled away from the hug and looked straight into her eyes. She stared back. He finally couldn't resist himself and captured her lips with his. She hesitated, but kissed back.
He pulled away a bit, so that their foreheads were touching. "Rose Tyler, I love you," he whispered.
Rose smiled. "I know. I love you, too." She kissed him this time, surprising him a bit. The kiss lasted until the two ran out of breath.
Rose suddenly realized something. "Oh my God! I forgot!" she ran out of the TARDIS and saw the second one still there. She unlocked it and went in. The other Doctor was still in there.
"'Ello again!" he grinned. "I think I'll be heading back. I can only go back once, however. Going through once made it big enough to go back, but I'll have to seal it off again. Be good, now." He started fiddling with the controls.
"Okay," she started heading out. "Thank you, by the way, for helping me." The Doctor, her Doctor, suddenly appeared from behind her.
"Oh my God, it's another me! In another TARDIS! This is brilliant!" The other Doctor turned around and raised an eyebrow.
"Is that what I'm going to look like in the future?" he went over to him, studying him.
"Yep!" both him and Rose chirped.
"Hmm… better than this face. Now, not to sound rude, but if you don't want to come with me, I suggest you get out." Rose and the Doctor looked at each other, and then back at him. Chuckling, the two went out of the other TARDIS.
The other Doctor pulled a lever, and the TARDIS started its Vwoooorp!ing. When it stopped, he sighed. Then he heard a bark from behind him. He turned and groaned. "Oh, no. Not you… Why do you follow me everywhere?"
"You made me this way, Doctor. I will follow you to the ends of every universe until you change me back."