After Great Pain

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They stayed at first because the Doctor – the new Doctor – seemed to need them. He said this regeneration had been hard on him, said it was taking longing than it normally did for his memories to return. Not that they'd all necessarily return, but he needed more than he had at the moment. Enough at least to let him function as a Time Lord should.

Rose sometimes thought the real reason they'd stayed was because they didn't know what else to do. They were as damaged as he was. The three of them had travelled around practically numb, Jack doing most of the piloting of the TARDIS, while the Doctor pottered about in a daze, tinkering with something or other in the control room with his sonic screwdriver. He'd seemed to remember that well enough.

Rose had spent most of that first week in her room staring blankly at the walls, wrapped in the Doctor's battered leather jacket. The TARDIS ensured the climate control in her room was perfect and it was truthfully too hot with it on, but the smell and feel of it comforted her. He'd been wearing it when they'd found him. Bloodstained and torn like him, but still basically in one piece. Rose had later discovered it hanging out of one of the waste units in the medilab, discarded because the man it belonged to was gone, and its new owner had no use for it.

That was when she'd started to hate him.

Another week passed and the Doctor began to take command. Little things at first, like suggesting they should stop drifting in the space-time vortex and actually land somewhere. They needed supplies, he'd said, and it would do them all good to get some fresh air. Jack picked a pretty sea planet and they spent a few hours there restocking, each of them carrying out their our own errands, lost to their own thoughts. When they had reboarded the TARDIS, the Doctor had taken his place at the controls and Jack had just moved aside. He left a few days later. He told them he'd met up with an old friend from his days as a Time Agent. The Doctor had seemed disappointed, but made no attempt to change his mind.

Jack hadn't offered to take Rose with him.

Not long after that the Doctor tried to talk to Rose about what had happened up on Satellite 5. She asked him to take her home. Rose thought that was the first time she'd seen him display any emotion stronger than mild curiosity in his new body. He asked her to stay, and then called her a sentimental little ape when she said no. Rose laughed, because that had almost sounded like something her Doctor would say. And then she cried and he patted her awkwardly on the back and told her he was sorry. He asked her again to stay, just for one more week; one more week to see if it would work. She agreed, but regretted it even as she said it.

He developed an almost desperate edge after that. It seemed nearly everything they did was frantic and rife with danger. They saved worlds and brought down armies and, sometimes, in the thick of it all, he'd turn to look at her with a mad gleam in his eyes that she almost recognised. But then he blinked, or said something in an accent that was as unfamiliar to her as his face, and the spell was broken.

Rose hated the quiet times when they were travelling through time and space the most. He followed her round the TARDIS like a lost puppy; huge eyes and gangling limbs that he didn't seem to have quite got the hang of. He talked a lot. Telling her things, asking her things and always, always watching her. Sometimes the weight of his gaze was so heavy she felt it would snap her in two. The TARDIS was vast, but she somehow conspired against Rose in all her efforts to avoid him. Every corridor led back to him, every room she settled in suddenly contained a previously unseen door that opened to reveal him. Rose stood his company with gritted teeth, and prayed for them to land somewhere soon.

Finally she asked him to take her back in time to see her Doctor. His surprise rapidly turned to anger. Rose ignored both emotions and begged. When her pleas failed to move him, she resorted to tears and then when that didn't work, reached up on tiptoe to bury her fingers in his hair, and her lips in his.

For a second he was frozen, cold in her embrace, and then he came to burning life. The air was squeezed from Rose's lungs as he wrapped his arms around her, dragging her to him, as close as two people could be without merging into one. Something buried inside Rose began to crack as he deepened the kiss. It felt as if she was splitting wide open, something huge and terrifying tearing at her, desperate to break free. But before it could he pushed her away, hands trembling, breath heaving from him, his face deathly pale.

Rose felt the ice inside her reform, the fissure sealing itself shut once more. She was aware, though, that something was wrong; it wasn't as solid as it had been before. Rose looked up and found the Doctor watching her. She refused to recognise the regret and tenderness burning in his eyes, and saw only pity.

When he said her name, a husky voiced plea, she turned and walked away, heading straight for the medilab. It took only moments to find what she needed and make her way back out of the room, and only seconds to pour the clear, odourless liquid into the Doctor's favourite mug. She waited for it to dry and then hung it back on the mug tree in the kitchen. That was something that hadn't changed – he still used the mug Rose had had made for him as a joke with 'World's Best Time Lord' printed on the side. At first she'd wondered if he'd remembered, but then Jack, drunk on tequila one night, had pointed out that he'd only have needed to remember he was a Time Lord to recognise the mug as his. Rose had considered breaking it then, smashing it into a million pieces, but somehow had been unable to. Now she was glad she hadn't – it made everything so much easier.

Rose slept deeply and dreamlessly that night and awoke feeling better than she had in what felt like forever. Freshly showered and with her face made up for the first time in weeks, she headed for the kitchen to make breakfast, and ate it sitting next to the Doctor's slumped form at the kitchen table. When she'd washed up her plate and cup, she headed for the control room and entered the co-ordinates she'd decided on the night before. She was going back to a time just before Jack had started travelling with them, a day when the Doctor had given in to her moaning and taken her space shopping. If she timed it right, the other her should be busily trawling through the thousands of shops housed on the moon planet, while the Doctor read newspapers at a starside café.

A/N There is a part two. Story title comes from the poem of the same name by Emily Dickinson.