Disclaimer: I don't own anyone or anything from Doctor Who except my Bad Wolf pin. If I did, things would have turned out very differently. So I'm just borrowing the characters for a bit. Please don't sue me because all you're likely to get is several pairs of baggy pants with a lot of metal on them and a large amount of funny colored hair dye.

Author's Note: First off, I'm from California. I did my best to get the language right without turning it into a caricature of British people, but this is my first foray into fiction in which everyone has an accent and slang different from my own. Secondly, I can only hope I got the lore right, as I quit the show when Ten left, and in my rewatchings, I can't actually make myself watch Doomsday, so I never get past it. But this idea wouldn't leave me alone and when it started to get long enough, I decided I should share it to make sure I'm not just writing it for me. I would love to hear all thoughts and any constructive criticism, most definitely including whether you think I should continue. I don't intend this to be more than two, maybe three parts.

Future History

The TARDIS was going crazy.

After the events of Krop Tor, the Doctor had set them drifting in the Time Vortex, feeling both he and Rose had some well-earned downtime to catch up on. Before he'd gotten down to the business of tinkering with his ship, making sure she wasn't damaged by her long fall, Rose had hugged him tightly and then retreated to the library. He had started his work, knowing she would return when she got bored or hungry or lonely, and found himself surprised when the TARDIS told him, in her own way, that it had been too long and that he should go find Rose.

The Doctor found the idea agreeable, and he'd just gotten up from under the grating when the TARDIS changed her mind, projecting to him the idea that Rose was working something out and needed the time on her own to get there. His brow furrowed in concern, but he didn't want to interrupt Rose's musings unnecessarily, so he returned to his maintenance.

Until four minutes later, when the TARDIS again urged him to seek out his companion. And then changed her mind again. The Doctor puzzled over this for a moment, then asked, "Are you changing your mind back and forth because that's what she's doing?" The TARDIS hummed in response, and he decided a visit with Rose would do them both a bit of good.

He found her pacing and muttering to herself, though he could only catch bits of phrases. "...Can't possibly have thought, but then why would he..." the Doctor heard her say before she turned in the opposite direction. On the way back, he heard, "...Completely mucking about with the timeline, and he must know..."

"Who's mucking about with the timeline now?" the Doctor asked, feeling this was a good place to step in, as interfering with time was something that most definitely concerned him.

Rose whipped around, a slightly guilty look on her face. He could feel the TARDIS in his mind, and she was worried about his companion, which was odd for his ship. She'd never gotten so attached to anyone as she was to Rose, excepting himself, of course. The Doctor quickly swept his eyes over Rose, making sure she wasn't injured in any way. His cursory inspection found her perfectly healthy.

"Um...Doctor...can I ask you something?" Rose asked, biting her lip.

"You just did," he replied with a smile. The ghost of that smile appeared on her face, but was gone just as quickly. He sat down on one of the couches and gestured for her to do the same. As she sat, he answered, "Of course, Rose. You know you can ask anything."

Not really, though, she thought, trying to keep the skepticism from showing in her eyes. I can't ask about Jack or Bad Wolf. Can't ask how you feel about me or what the end of that sentence was, back on Earth. None of those things were what troubled her at the moment though, so she pushed them to the back of her mind and concentrated on phrasing her question correctly. "Doctor...can you think of any reason you would go back and visit a companion of yours before you met her? Or rather, before she met you, I suppose."

The Doctor tilted his head, confused, but searching his mind for an answer to her question anyway. Was there any scenario in which he would do something like that? "I can't think of anything," he admitted. "The logistics behind it are troublesome. I couldn't go back to someone if that someone knew the form I would go back in. Like if I wanted to go back to see Sarah Jane before she met me, for example, I'd have to wait to do it until I'd regenerated into someone she wouldn't recognize."

Rose could follow his logic, but it only made her more certain that something was horribly wrong with their situation. She latched on to the Sarah Jane example immediately, not wanting to add herself to the story until she'd gotten a few more answers out of him. "What if..." she had to pause, reminding herself that she was supposed to be talking about Sarah Jane, not herself. "What if she were to...die? And the only way you could see her again would be to go back before? Can you think of anything that would make you do it even then?"

The Doctor was now very concerned. If Rose was bringing up the death of his former companion, she wasn't just thinking up hypotheticals. "What is this really about, Rose?"

"I'll tell you everything, I promise. I just need to try to figure this out on my own first. Can you answer?"

Once more, he gave her question some real thought before speaking. "No, I still wouldn't go back. Time isn't the same for me; you know that. No matter how desperate I was to see her, I wouldn't go back before regenerating unless the world was in peril and she was the only one who could help. And that would endanger my own timeline."

She sighed. There was no further way to avoid it. Now she had to ask one of those questions that toed the line of all that was forbidden. She met his eyes, those timeless, soulful eyes that she loved, and asked in a very small voice, "What if it was me?"

At that question, he looked like he'd been punched in the stomach. Every muscle in his body tensed, and his eyes grew wide and worried. He moved suddenly to grip her upper arms tightly, staring into her eyes as if he could get the answers out of her mind by sheer force of will. "Rose. Tell me what you know. Right. Now."

Rose broke out of his grip to stand up and resume her pacing, this time in front of the couch. It took her a moment to realize that he could easily have kept her in place had he felt the need to, but despite his new intense focus on the problem she was presenting, he was still trying to let her work it out in her own way. She glanced up at him for a moment before looking away again. "Do you remember how upset I was when you...changed? I don't know how much you were actually aware of when you were in your healing coma, but did you hear me crying to my mum about how I'd lost you?"

The Doctor nodded. "It was like being underwater. I could hear what was going on above the surface, in a muffled, distorted sort of way, but I had to struggle harder to be fully aware, and harder still to make my body react. But yes, I remember that bit clearly." The memory still stung, if he was being honest with himself, but the exuberance with which Rose had accepted him after that had eased that pain several times over.

"Well..." she hesitated again, now completely avoiding meeting his eyes. "You thought it was about you not looking the same and about being all asleep and unhelpful with the invasion and all. My mum thought that too, and it was, but...that's not quite all." Before the Doctor could prod her along, she took a deep breath and rushed onward with her story, "See, the thing is...when you regenerated, I recognized you. I'd seen you before."

She was still pacing, so the Doctor reached out and grabbed her hand, gently pulling her to a stop. "Rose," he said, his voice calm and serious now. He was trying to calm her even while he felt like he was trapped on a roller coaster with no obvious way to exit. "Come on, sit down. Tell me what happened, and we can puzzle this out. You're sure it was me you saw?"

She sat down and nodded. "Yes. I've thought about this a thousand times, and I don't think you meant for me to see you. The way you were standing, the place, I'd have walked right on by if you hadn't made a noise." Her brow creased in concern, even though he was sitting right in front of her. "You sounded like you were in pain. But then you were sweet. Charming. I thought you were drunk, asking what year it was, but then..."

"Then?"

"You told me you thought I'd have a great year. It was just after midnight on New Years, 2005. Not long before I met you."

It wasn't a roller coaster he was trapped on, the Doctor realized. It was one of those awful spinny rides that always went on far too long, leaving even his superior Time Lord physiology feeling dizzy and wrong. "Okay...you said you've thought about this a lot. What do you think I was doing there? Why do you think it has anything to do with your..." He had to force himself to say the words. "Your death."

"Well, if I were still with you, you wouldn't have needed to come see me because I'd have been right there. But when I learned about you not aging and all that, I thought maybe it was a hundred years for you, and I'd lived to ninety-seven and died in bed, surrounded by my loved ones. And maybe you were in the area for something else and felt a bit nostalgic and popped by for a look. But then...then the Beast said I'd be dying in battle soon, and..."

"It was lying," he nearly growled.

"Maybe, but what if it wasn't? That's why I had to tell you."

"You shouldn't even remember this!" he realized. "Humans, you almost always forget things when they're going to conflict with your timeline. I haven't done it yet, so you shouldn't remember it yet."

Rose had been following his thinking up until this point, but now he had lost her. "Explanation, please?"

The Doctor tried to calm himself again, then let his mouth run off with the details, knowing she would catch most if not all of the important parts. "If what you're saying is true, and I believe you when you say it is, then sometime in the future, I will visit you in your past, but that's an enormous risk to the timeline, as you've already gathered. Except it shouldn't really be such a risk because the laws of the universe usually prevent humans from remembering violations like that until it's too late to change the future. Either something happens to make them forget, or they were drunk and don't remember in the first place, or the encounter is so forgettable that it fades completely after a few days. Until, in my own time, I take that risk, and then you would remember that it happened. It would just slot right back into your memory like it was never gone, and you'd never notice that it hadn't been there. That's how it works most of the time, but you're remembering that this happened before I've done it, which means either you've grown incredibly psychic in record time, or something is extremely wrong here."

"But we still don't know why you'd go see me then. So let's say I die in battle soon, like the Beast said." Off his look, she added, "Just for argument's sake. Not saying I believe it." She believed it more and more the longer they talked about it, but she wasn't going to tell him that. "But if that were true? Would you risk your timeline to see me one last time?"

Just thinking about this was causing him more pain than his last regeneration had, and he knew he wasn't covering it up very well. "You said you thought I was drunk? In pain?"

"Yeah, you looked...I dunno, sickly, I guess."

"Maybe I was dying too," he mused aloud. He heard her sudden intake of breath and could only guess that she was having a similar reaction to his potential death as he was having to hers. Maybe even stronger, as she was sure he wasn't meant to die. "Yes," he decided. "If you...died, and I was dying, I might go see you then."

Tears started to form in Rose's eyes, and she tried to blink them away with little success. He'd presented another question she knew she could never ask, and he would never answer. If you were dying, why would I be the last person in all of time and space you'd want to see? She didn't want to cry, and she couldn't ask the question, so she settled for the only kind of comfort she could seek, throwing herself into his arms for one of the hugs that always made her feel better.

They stayed like that for a long time, both silent, both trying to discover an alternate explanation for the future Doctor's visit to Rose's past. None occurred to either of them.

"It's not fixed," the Doctor murmured when the quiet got to be too much for him, attempting to comfort himself as much as her. "Just because we can't figure out any other reason I'd go there doesn't mean another reason doesn't exist."

"Too many negatives," Rose replied. Then something he had said clicked in her head, and she quickly sat up, pulling away from him. "It's not fixed, you said. That means any little thing that happens can change it? And you're sure?"

He straightened as well, seeing new hope in her eyes. "Yes. I would know if there were some sort of fixed point you were meant to be involved in. Anything can change it...and then you just wouldn't remember being visited at all because I would have never been there. You only remember now because nothing has changed it yet."

"Then we can change it?"

The Doctor slumped back, the hope deflating out of him as quickly as it had come. "In theory, yes, but how? We can't know what's coming to set these things in motion. Unless there's quite a lot of documentation about it in the future, I suppose..."

"We don't need documentation, Doctor," Rose said. She bit her lip, hesitating as she went over the plan forming in her mind. It sounded absolutely insane, and the more thought she put into it, the crazier it got. But it also made a strange sense to her. "We already have someone who knows absolutely everything we need to know."

He had a feeling he knew where she was going with this, and if he was right, then he couldn't really decide if it was the best idea or the worst idea he'd ever heard. He was leaning toward the worst. After all, it could and likely would be disastrous. "And who would that be?"

Rose let her eyes drift toward the ceiling as she prepared to argue her point. She knew the Doctor was not going to like this. So she thought through the whole thing again, her head bobbing back and forth as she cemented her feelings on the matter and decided on several counterpoints to the objections she thought him most likely to bring up. Then she met his eyes again. "You. We have to go talk to the you who visited me that night."