First he sees it in a takeaway menu.
The solid weight of the counter that he's leaning up against might as well have vanished, for all the support it's offering. His stomach lurches and his flimsy single heart races as he parses those two impossible words, written in bright red, kitschy faux-Chinese font, between Spring Rolls — 3 For £1! and Firecracker Pork.
Bad Wolf.
"Rose," the Doctor croaks, weakly. "Rose."
Rose's head snaps up, over where she's sitting at the kitchen table, bent over a stack of reports. She's on-alert instantly, always ready for trouble at the drop of a hat, and it's perhaps the first time that he's glad that she seems to be on a hair-trigger all the time now — that she's so much more a soldier, never quite relaxed, that she's so much more like him — and there's command in her voice when she asks, "What? What is it?"
He splutters wordlessly and looks back down at the menu only to find that the words have gone. The takeaway menu now says Broccoli With Beef instead of Bad Wolf.
Every breath he takes suddenly feels shallow, insufficient; there's no possible way that the action can bring in enough air to fill the gaping maw of panic where his lungs ought to be. This body is such rubbish, honestly — it can't deal with anything, with stress or sweat or body odor or paying attention to things that aren't the way Rose's neck is exposed when she pulls her hair back behind one ear like that.
It was a trick of the light, perhaps. Had to have been. Or lack of sleep, maybe — those four hours he'd though this hybrid body needed aren't quite enough, after all. He'll try for a full six, tonight.
"Nothing," the Doctor backtracks quickly, trying to push down the bile that rises in his throat as he pushes out the lie. "Sorry. It was…nothing."
A few weeks go by before he finally tells her.
If he's being honest with himself, he might not have told her at all if it wasn't for the fact that after the takeaway menu, he also sees the words on a street sign, as an answer in a crossword puzzle, and finally on the side of a milk carton, as Bad Wolf Distributors, Inc. With the street sign and the crossword puzzle he does a double-take, sure that he can't actually be seeing those words, and both times he finds them replaced with some other innocuous phrase.
But with the milk carton, the Doctor stops for a moment and stares at the words, keeping his eyes on them for as long as he can manage before blinking becomes absolutely necessary.
When they're still there after he opens his eyes, he puts the milk carton down on the counter and goes to find Rose.
He expects her to be angry. He expects for this to dovetail into the argument they'd had (that they're still sort of having) about him needing to tell her things, to be more open about the things that matter.
It's a hard habit to break. He's got nothing left to hold onto except Rose and his secrets, and he's not particularly keen on sharing either.
But when he sits down on the end of the bed, while Rose is getting dressed, and tells her about the takeaway menu and the crossword puzzle and the milk carton, she isn't angry.
In fact, Rose stops getting dressed and comes to sit next to him on the bed. She's just in jeans and a camisole, and she settles down next to him, staring silently at her hands in her lap for a few moment before speaking.
"I saw it the week before Bad Wolf Bay," she says quietly, and he's about to say that that makes sense, given that he'd seen it not too long before that as well — on Shan Shen, with Donna.
Then she says, "The first time," and his heart clenches.
"I was a mess, you know," Rose almost whispers. "Made out like I wasn't, though, and buried myself in work. Kept on tellin' everyone it was just a matter of time, till you found a way to get through."
She gives him a quick, wan smile before going on. "Then I was coming home on the Tube one day and it was just — there. On the wall of the train, right in the middle of an ad. Seein' it kept me going, all through the rest of that rubbish week. An' then one night I woke up with your voice in my head, and I was sure that it was a sign, you know? That it meant I was going home."
He doesn't say I'm sorry, but he does grab her hand, and Rose gives it a grateful squeeze. "Only that didn't happen, of course. An' after — after all that, after I peeled myself up off the ground and slogged on, it just…popped up, now and then."
Rose tucks a lock of stray hair behind her ear and stares at the ground. "It scared me to death, at first. Saw the words every now an' then, just…there. Never sayin' anything important or warning me or anything." She wrinkles her nose. "And they don't always stay, not like they did before. 'S like they're…fading. Here one moment and gone the next. Like leftovers."
"They were never warnings?" he asks, trying not to sound harsh. "Nothing ever accompanied them, nothing—" Catastrophic. Wonderful. Universe-altering.
Rose shakes her head. "No. Like I said, it scared me to death, but nothin' ever came of it. Half the time I'm not sure I didn't imagine it." She laughs, low and shaky, and squeezes his hand again. "I could have done without it, sometimes. Was a bit like rubbing salt in the wound, when things weren't goin' right."
The Doctor nods mutely, less sure than ever how to talk about this — about the time they've spent apart, alone.
"But I was glad for it, in the end. Helped keep me going." Rose uses her free hand to turn his face towards hers. "Maybe it's trying to do the same for you."
"But I don't—" The words that will form the thought he really wants to give her — that she's all he needs to keep going, that she's all he's ever needed, that he's rubbish without her, and that at any given time there's a man out there somewhere, somewhen who is living proof of it — stick to the inside of his throat. He wants to tell her that even though he's rubbish at being a human, even though there's a part of him that will probably always be panicking at the prospect of doors and carpets, even though he misses the hum of the TARDIS and the still dark quiet of the stars, he will always keep going as long as she does, too.
He wants to tell her that there's nothing those words can tell him that she doesn't already say every day. Every day she spent trying to get back to him, every day she doesn't chuck him out for being pants at this domestic thing, every day she tells him that she loves him.
"I sent them once, didn't I?" Rose asks gently, when he doesn't continue. It sounds like more of a rhetorical question than a genuine wonder. "The words. More than once, I suppose. Loads of different times and places. A message to lead myself there, to you."
"You did," he manages. "You saw everything, Rose, for a moment."
"So if it's not a warning — and I don't think it is," she says, in a voice that begs the universe please don't let it be, "Then it's just…something from me to you, yeah?"
She smiles, and it's more real this time, wide and warm instead of shaky and wan. "A bit of the past, to go with the future?"
It tapers off, eventually.
There are whole years where he doesn't see the words even once. Years where he forgets to even look for them, because their life is so full to bursting that the idea that three hundred and sixty-five Earth days once seemed like a blink of an eye to him is mind-boggling.
And then there are days where it's everywhere, all at once — like the day their daughter's born, when he sees it half a dozen times on the road to the hospital, and in the placards on the doors there, and in the card attached to the balloons Jackie brings along to Rose and the baby's room.
It's not a warning, not anymore.
It's a reminder, knitted into the fabric of the universe, of where he has always been headed. Of where Rose has led him and where he's led her and where they've run forward, blind, together.
Of where he is going, has gone, will go.