Holy Water
Disclaimer: I do not, have not, and will never own Doctor Who. They are just toys I play with that belong to the BBC.
A/N: Takes place in an AU because, well, it just hit me as something that might happen between them.
The Doctor looked at the shell of a woman that used to be Rose Tyler. A woman that used to be full of life and strength, but after all the years she spent in the alternate reality with her mother, alternate father, and Mickey, she was but a ghost of the woman she was. Someone there had taken what was left of her innocence and left her with a haunting memory that she couldn't get out of her head. He watched her kneeling at the edge of her bed back on the TARDIS and he could only imagine what she was feeling as she was praying to whatever deity she followed now.
He recalled what she had said the first time he saw her after somehow getting taken back to the reality that he had thought had been closed when he had lost her that fateful day they fought the Daleks and Cybermen on Earth, she had asked him to take her away as far away as he could and never take her back. Rose had wanted him to hold her and surround her with what she knew was his love for her, even if he could never tell her as much.
Rose was hurting badly, The Doctor sensed that in his closest companion in years, but he wasn't sure how he was supposed to help her when he was as damaged as she was, he just hid it well. He knew that she was looking for someone to put the old fire back into her eyes, and to give her the support she needed and hold her when she cried, but those were things that he needed as well, he just could never get over his fear of abandonment and of hurting those he relied on to be able to take what he needed or to give it in return.
Until Rose finds that one person that could help her, The Doctor knew that she would, like him, continue to look through the faces in all the different, exotic places he took her to until she found someone to help her heal, maybe someday he'd meet her and she'd be able to tell him how it feels to go from broken to whole, but he doubted that after this that he'd see her ever again. It wasn't his duty to see her after she had been brought back and made whole again, just to deliver her to the one who would.