She sees the bright yellow light bursting throughout the room like an explosion of fire. Though she can't see the person standing in the middle of it clearly, she still knows what it means. How could she forget? It was one of the most important moments of her life the first time around. She never wanted to watch it happen again, though.
The light stops abruptly, as if snapped back into the man. Rose isn't sure she wants to look, but at the same time, she can't quite divert her gaze.
Rose thinks she's already seen almost more than she can bear in her journey home. She's seen universes where the Earth has been so thoroughly destroyed that there's not a living thing or any discernable infrastructure for miles, even though she knows that geographically she's in what should be the centre of London. She's seen a version of Earth where slavery wasn't abolished centuries ago, as it had been in both of her universes, but rather kept extending until everyone but a handful of upper class males were no more than property to be used up and discarded.
She's seen dozens of different places, each slightly more disheartening than the last. But she knows, looking into just-opened eyes that are brand new and yet so old that they hurt more to look at than anything else she's seen, that nothing she's come across can compare to the horrors he's observed.
The Dimension Cannon is currently set to move her across space but not across time, Rose knows. Not really, anyway. It deposits her as close as possible to wherever the Doctor is at the equivalent time in that universe (with a bit of leeway for safety reasons, the techies at Torchwood had explained, so that she didn't appear in the Vortex or something). She's seen more different planets in her travels with the Dimension Cannon than she saw even while she was with the Doctor himself. If it weren't so depressing, Rose thought it might have been a strange sort of thrill to be making her way across the universe on her own. As it is, she'd rather be travelling with him any day.
But still, knowing that time hasn't shifted, and recognising that she's clearly on Earth this time, it's still a little disconcerting to see a city beyond the window that's quite possibly at least a thousand years ahead of her time. Time in this universe must move faster. Or perhaps technology had just advanced more quickly.
Looking at the man she's just watched regenerate, something tells her that it isn't just the Earth that's older than she expected after all. He's lived centuries since last she saw him. At least that long. It doesn't show on his face at all, but somehow it's still there for anyone to see. Certainly Rose, who once knew this man so very well, can easily tell.
Her first clue that he doesn't recognise her is that he looks directly at her and doesn't so much as blink. She scolds herself for thinking that she'd be important enough to him to be remembered a thousand years and countless companions later. But then she realises that though she's just seen him regenerate, he hasn't changed from what she remembers, which means that he's regenerated from the big-eared, balding man she once knew into the man that stands before her. She's seen that before. She was the cause of it. If it didn't happen how she remembered it, then there's a good chance she wasn't there to make it happen here.
She's got the wrong universe. Again. It's surprising how much the revelation hurts her still, every time.
She's not sure whether to feel guilty that without her the Doctor could have kept that initial body she knew for another millennium without getting himself killed. Somehow she doesn't think the Doctor she knew would have wanted to live this long anyway. He'd already seen almost too much when he first picked her up like a barely-wanted stray. Somehow he'd partly bounced back from that in her presence so that when this exact regeneration had occurred in her world he'd been turned into the Time Lord equivalent of an over-energetic puppy. The Doctor here and now looked like no such thing. If anything, he looked like he was having trouble just holding his head up.
Rose suddenly knew where the phrase 'bone tired' came from. There was only so much one person could take before just going on took more effort than they had to spare.
"I'm Rose Tyler," she says. He gives her a cursory glance and then dismisses her. She pushes back the lump that forms in her throat. This isn't her Doctor. He doesn't know her. It shouldn't matter to her.
"And you're the Doctor," she continues. Now she's got his attention, but he doesn't look at her suspiciously like her Doctor would have. He just raises an eyebrow and waits. Time has obviously taught him patience. It's almost tragic, Rose thinks, that a man who couldn't shut up for a second in a different lifetime now isn't bothered with saying a single word. She'll never complain about his motor mouth again. If she ever sees her Doctor again, that is.
"Are you the last here as well?"
When keeping his eyebrow raised for another half a minute doesn't have the desired result of making Rose continue to talk without his input, the Doctor sighs and asks, "Last of what?" His voice is a little scratchy-sounding, as if it hasn't been used much (which, of course, these particular vocal chords obviously haven't been) It's still distinctively him, though.
"Last of the Time Lords," she replies.
Where once he might have flinched a little, or at least have narrowed his eyes, now he blinks calmly.
"Since long before you were born," he admits. Then he frowns and clucks his tongue slightly. "Before," he says again, slightly muffled. "Be-Fore."
"New teeth?" she suggests.
"Nothing about me is new, really."
She remembers his ridiculous grin as he once joked, "New, new doctor." She misses him now even more than she did after he disappeared on the beach in Norway. Having him so close, and yet really not, just makes things harder.
"Yeah," she mutters. "Me either."
The Doctor snorts. "Rose Tyler, compared to me you're so shiny and new you've still got the packaging on. Like that bubbly wrappy … stuff, before any of the little air pockets have been popped. What are you, twenty? Twenty-five?"
"I couldn't even say how old I am," Rose admits. "Time travel messes up your internal calendar when you're not a Time Lord with senses to track that sort of thing. Either way, my relative age doesn't mean I haven't been popped pretty thoroughly."
She realises the connotation of what she's just said and blushes. Somehow it comforts her that making inadvertent innuendo with the Doctor can still make her blush, even after all that's happened. She feels normal for the first time in years. Now she just has to decide whether 'normal' is still a good fit for her.
"You're out of your time," the Doctor concludes matter-of-factly. "Likely some kind of time fluctuation linking your time to mine, probably initiated when you met me, since you seem to already know who I am. One up on me. Even I don't know who I am. Not yet."
"Well, that mouthful would have proved you're the Doctor if nothin' else did. How'd you know I wasn't from here?"
The Doctor points at her thighs.
"Denim, indigo dye number 328, 21st century. The kind that fades no matter how closely you follow those instructions on the little tag."
"Jack knew I was out of my time because of my clothes, too," she remembers distantly.
"It took them a few hundred years to fix that," he continues, ignoring her. He doesn't know who Jack is, after all, so why should he care about her reminiscing. "Probably didn't help that denim kept going in and out of fashion like a recompacted internal product unit on the blink." He eyes her speculatively, realising she doesn't understand a word of that. "Or, you know, like one of those jack-in-the-box things from pre-revolutionary Earth."
"Pre-revolutionary?"
"Spoilers," the Doctor warns. "After sixteen hundred years, avoiding the spoilers of life becomes the only thing that makes it bearable."
When she looks him in the eyes, she tries not to let the pity show. His reaction lets her know that she's largely failed. Nevertheless, there are things she feels she needs to say to him, and a glare or two won't put her off.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this for you."
The Doctor laughs bitterly. "Of course it was. Curse of the Time Lords, that we always outlived everyone we met off world. It's just an added kick in the teeth that my curse was to outlive all of the other Time Lords as well."
"You had companions, though," she offers a little desperately, keen to get him off the topic of his near-immortality. Even with her Doctor in her universe that was always a sore spot, and he hadn't yet lived anywhere near as long as this man. "You had people who travelled with you. Who cared if you went and did something stupid and got yourself regenerated."
"Yes," the Doctor agrees. "I had that. Once, almost longer ago than I can remember. Before the Time War."
Rose deflates a little. "There's been no one since then? Seven hundred years on your own?"
"It was better that way. Having companions is painful. They aren't worth the pain of having to watch them die or leave."
Rose recoils. Isn't she worth it, she wants to ask. But she isn't worth anything at all to him, of course, because he hadn't met her when he was supposed to. She wonders what happened to Rose Tyler in this universe. Maybe she died, or never existed. Maybe she was a dog or something; it's hardly unheard of.
Even after all she has seen it's this that proves too much.
"I can't be here," she says, backing away from him. "You're wrong. This world's so wrong."
"I know," he says. "Imagine hundreds of years living with that feeling."
She can't imagine it. She doesn't want to imagine it. The very thought of it terrifies her.
Rose knows then that a better person than herself would stay behind in this universe, at least for a time, and do whatever she can to help the Doctor. Perhaps it's a little arrogant of her to think she could make a difference. But having her around in her universe seemed to have helped cure his loneliness to some extent, so maybe she could still have had some impact here and now. She just can't, though. She tries to tell herself that it's because she has a job to do. Her parents and Tony and Mickey and the rest of that world are relying on her to stop the stars from going out, and she can't let them down. She knows, though, that as logical as that reasoning is, it barely actually even enters her mind when she's making the decision. All that really matters is that this isn't her world or her Doctor, but that one day it might be, or close enough. The very thought of the Doctor – her Doctor – lonely and damaged like this makes her want to run until her legs wear down to dust.
The Dimension Cannon takes a minute to do its thing once she's activated the sequence. She spends thirty seconds of it in silence just staring at the man who isn't, can't be, anything like her Doctor, identical though they might be.
"Find someone," she blurts at last. "Maybe we're stupid apes and we're not worth half of you or whatever, but you need someone anyway. You can't go another seven hundred years like this."
"I doubt –" he begins, but the Dimension Cannon jerks her away before she can even properly hear whether his response is angry or just plain disbelieving. Did he listen to her at all?
She can't think about it right now. It's too damn depressing.
When she is shot into a new world and stumbles into the night at a jerky run, she nearly lets her legs fall out from underneath her purely out of relief. This world doesn't feel as completely wrong as the last, or the one before that.
Well, not yet at least, she thinks as she catches sight of the flashing lights that only ever signal that some sort of tragedy has happened. Ambulance, she identifies as she nears it. Wherever the Doctor's at is where Rose has tended to appear in each universe, and ambulances where the Doctor is located are never a good thing. Nor are army vehicles right there in the streets of London whether the Doctor's there or not, for that matter.
The ambulance is pulling away without the sirens going, and she knows that that's the worst sign yet. Her feet take it upon themselves to take off at a run. She ignores the red-bereted UNIT soldiers – if they're anything like the UNIT from either of her universes, they're almost as useless as the old Torchwood regime – in favour of finding any civilian who might have a clue what's happening.
The red-headed woman who'd been staring after the ambulance moments before Rose caught her doesn't speak with the right sort of gravity to tell someone that the Doctor is dead. She clearly doesn't know him, because anyone who's met him even in passing would have probably fallen into tears by now; such is the tragedy of just the idea of the Doctor's long life ending. The only thing keeping Rose from collapsing into hysterical gasping sobs herself is the staunch assertion that this just isn't her universe yet again. It can't be. How could her Doctor possibly be dead? Regenerated, perhaps, but there's no way that he could have died and have the universe just go on without him.
But then, as much as she tells herself that her final destination isn't here, isn't him, this world still – even after finding out the Doctor is dead, of all things – doesn't really feel all that wrong to her. There's a sense of something familiar in the air, like she's been here before.
Like she's lived the first nineteen years of her life here, maybe.
"I came so far," Rose says. Dejected, she presses the button to call for a jump to the next universe.
The woman in front of Rose doesn't grasp what she's really saying with those four simple words – how could she? But something in her eyes, something in her reaction to seeing the Doctor dead even though she clearly doesn't know him, makes Rose look twice at her.
There's something special about this woman, even though to Rose's increasingly jaded eyes she looks utterly ordinary. Perhaps this is what the Doctor saw in a hopeless nineteen-year-old shopgirl several years earlier. It makes her feel connected to him to think of it, even though here he's dead.
"What's your name?" she asks.
"Donna."
For the first time since realising that telling any of the people that she comes across her real name could have terrible consequences, Rose feels bad she can't reciprocate.
She tells Donna what she's been feeling this whole time, that everything's just wrong. But the only thing that's wrong here – apart from the obvious, because the Doctor being dead is nothing if not wrong – is that something's wrong with Donna, and she doesn't even know it. Rose doesn't know what exactly it is, but she finds she wants to know. She wants to help Donna.
She couldn't help the Doctor in the previous world; he was too old and had been alone too long for someone like her to be able to help unless she'd devoted the rest of her life to trying (and with her own Doctor out there somewhere waiting for her, she isn't quite willing to do that). But Rose knows just enough to be able to help someone a little bit more like herself.
And that, she figures, is as good a sign as any that she's where she's supposed to be, for now, even though it doesn't seem to be the right place, precisely.
Donna disappears before she even gets to turn around – or rather, Rose disappears. Looking around at her new surroundings, Rose picks up her Torchwood phone (which ironically works between her and the base between different universes when even the phone the Doctor's jiggery-pokeried device couldn't do the same for the two of them) and dials.
"That universe I was just in?" she says. "Send me back there. I want to follow it through. And could you reset the device? I need a bit of a time jump."
She's told herself often enough that all the heartache she's encountered throughout the universes will be worth it so long as she can get back to the Doctor eventually. But now she thinks that maybe there's a little something else she can do along the way.
~FIN~