A/N: Five years after the events in Journey's End, Rose wakes after an odd dream. Mild spoilers for The Day of the Doctor.

Beta'd by the lovely HpGwperfect.

Standard disclaimer: I own no part of Doctor Who.

Chapter One-The Slow Path

[In which the past is established]

Rose sat up in bed, slightly dazed from her lingering dream.

"Doctor," she said, gently shaking the man next to her.

"Ungh," came the muttered response from under the covers.

"Doctor," she tried again, "I had another dream."

"I'm up!" heard Rose as the Doctor rolled over to face her. "You had another one? That's the first in a while."

"Yeah," she replied, "but this one was weird. It's like there was an echo. You were there, and you were there, and you were there."

She could almost hear the Doctor's blink in response.

"Echo. Right. Rose, are you awake?"

Rose sighed. "Yes, Doctor, I am awake. I'm forgetting the dream fast, though. It was like," she paused. "It was like I was seeing it from three people at once, but they were all you."

The Doctor sat up in bed and seemed more fully awake. "Welllll, I suppose, technically speaking, that's not without precedent" he said, scratching the back of his neck.

Rose turned on the bedside lamp.

"Okay, your turn to explain, then," she said, getting comfortable facing him.

O~O~O~O~O~O

As the Doctor explained prior crossings of his timeline, Rose, still sleepy and fuzzy-minded, reflected on their past in this world. The Doctor-Doctor Arthur Noble in public, but Rose would always think of him as "Doctor"-had been in Pete's World for five years. At first, the idea of taking the slow path for the ten years or so required to grow the TARDIS seemed to both terrify and thrill the Doctor. The very first night, though, when Rose woke from a nightmare, crying hard enough that the Doctor came running from his room across the hall, the Doctor found something to focus on.

Somehow, Rose had seen the fully-Time Lord Doctor's loss of Donna Noble.

After extensive tests (courtesy of the Doctor's expertise and Torchwood's equipment) and several more dreams, the Doctor's best guess was that Rose had formed a connection with the TARDIS through her experience as Bad Wolf. When the other Doctor was actively thinking of Rose, the TARDIS passed along what he was seeing and feeling (no sound, oddly enough) to Rose. What baffled both Rose and the Doctor was the fact that the walls between the parallel worlds remained tightly sealed, without any apparent way for the TARDIS to be contacting Rose.

In the meantime, the Doctor also ran plenty of tests on himself. It seemed that, in addition to the single heart, the Doctor had a handful of biological aspects that were closer to human than to Time Lord. Specifically, his mental capacity and what went with it, to include his sense of time and ability to see both real and potential timelines, had remained Time Lord. He could hold his breath longer than most, had better-than-average senses, and needed only about 4 hours of sleep each night. Otherwise, he was miraculously, depressingly human.

Because the Doctor was dealing with the mystery of Rose's dreams and his own adjustments to being part human-to include a job, a paycheck, and a flat-their romantic relationship progressed more slowly than it might have otherwise. Their first "dates" often involved trips to medical facilities, legal offices, and storage units as they collected data, arranged for Dr. Arthur Noble's existence, and retrieved useful alien artifacts labeled as non-functional. The Doctor was thrilled when Rose was able to supply him with his very own sonic screwdriver. Granted, he was a little disturbed when he realised she'd acquired it from the unfortunate version of him who never met Donna, but he was able to put that aside at his pleasure in having his screwdriver returned to him.

After things settled down, and after the two had moved out of the Tyler mansion and into a flat about mid-way between the mansion and the Torchwood office at which the Doctor and Rose worked, things started to heat up. Kisses became more frequent and more often turned into full-on snogging. They started sharing a bed-just to sleep, at first-after a particularly vivid dream Rose had about a year after acquiring the flat. She woke up so heartbroken that she refused to let the Doctor go from her bedroom after he'd come in to make sure she was okay. "You don't want to go," she said, "so don't."

Later, the Doctor told her how hard sharing a bed without sharing their bodies was, but Rose had assumed at the time that he was just being the Doctor, unaffected by physical needs in the same way as humans. When they finally crossed that line, he proved her wrong both thoroughly and repeatedly.

Officially, Rose Tyler, the Vitex heiress, had started dating Dr. Noble only recently, a bit over four years since they had returned to Pete's World (though why they still called it that was beyond Rose). The couple's uncommon choices of date locations-often dangerous locations that doubled as tricky Torchwood missions, sometimes undercover or overseas-had kept their relationship away from the media for much longer than anyone had expected. The rest of the Tyler family seemed a little relieved to be out of the spotlight for a while; the media had long ignored Rose since she didn't date or drink in public or anything else that might sell stories, and Pete and Jackie had been amazed that the two kept their relationship hidden for so long. If Rose were being honest with herself, she'd admit she suspected Pete may have interfered a few times in the past to give them more time in private and that Jackie may have leaked the Doctor and Rose's location during a proper date in hopes of forcing the two to make a commitment. Instead, the couple now regularly made gossip headlines for their extravagant trips all over the world; the traveling helped keep the both of them sane while adjusting (or re-adjusting, for Rose) to life without the TARDIS.

O~O~O~O~O~O

"And so I kept running," concluded the Doctor. Rose, having missed much of his story in her reminiscing, smiled and said, "My Doctor. Always running."

"Yup!" he replied. "That's me!" He grinned at Rose, that smile that she still swore could melt a marble statue. "But I don't understand how it could have happened again. And I wonder which of my faces I had. Do you remember?"

Rose tried to think. "No. I'm sorry, Doctor, but it's already faded. It's like my head couldn't keep them all at once and so it didn't hold onto any."

"Ah. Yes, that makes sense. I don't know how much I'll even remember himself. Ourselves? Anyway," he glanced at the clock, "I'm up for the day. What about you?"

"You're kidding, right, Doctor? It's three in the mornin'. I'm going back to sleep. Of course, you can help me get there, if you want."

The Doctor grinned, a different kind of heat in his gaze now. "Oh, right, I suppose I could help with that."

And he did.