They walked through the quiet old wood hand-in-hand, as they had done across time and universes.

The baby TARDIS waited for them, tucked into the shelter of a dead trunk, virtually invisible next to the bleached wood. If they hadn't been able to hear her low, contented humming in their heads, they would never have known she was there.

Still holding Rose's hand, the Doctor removed a key from his pocket. As he approached the tiny time machine, he held the key out and the lock glowed helpfully in response. Rose watched as he unlocked the door with a soft snick. It opened inward, the light emanating outward heart-wrenchingly familiar. It had been eight years since they'd last seen the inside of a TARDIS.

The Doctor turned to Rose and grinned. She gave him her most brilliant smile in return, tongue firmly tucked in her teeth, and together they entered their TARDIS for the first time.

****

Rose awoke slowly, lying prone on a cold concrete floor. Everything was very quiet and no light filtered through her closed eyelids. She wasn't quite clear on what had happened, but this was hardly the first time she'd witnessed an explosion by being blown from its vicinity. She knew her hearing and sight would come back slowly. She managed to peel one eyelid open and immediately slammed it back shut. The light was minimal, but drifting dust had lodged itself into her eye. Rose blinked furiously, trying to clear the foreign material from under her eyelids. No tears would come to help the process along. She tried to move her arms and legs and couldn't. Fright shot through her to her bones and she took a deep breath, willing herself to relax. Whatever had happened, she wouldn't help matters by panicking. All her years with the Doctor and Torchwood had taught her nothing if not that.

She tried moving each limb individually and could only move one of her arms a few inches. She suspected she must be pinned in debris. She felt incredibly strange, as though she weren't quite in her body. It must be shock, she told herself. Either that or she was more badly injured than she wanted to contemplate.

Well, the rest of the team had been about, anyway; surely they would manage to dig her out shortly. There was nothing to do but wait. The Doctor should be able to find her easily. They had been linked for seven years now, the feeling as familiar as her old blue leather jacket. He had always lamented that the telepathic bond they'd formed wasn't as strong as it might have been with his full Time Lord self, but it had always been strong enough for them to feel each other's presence. She couldn't sense him now, though. That was strange, too. Where could he have got to that made him invisible to her? It had only happened once before in seven years, and she didn't think there were any T'K'Rasi around here to overpower all the other telepaths with their blaring trumpet-like thoughts.

She reached out mentally and found she could sense little Keira, all those miles off outside London with Jackie, which gave her the first sense of relief she'd had. At least her daughter was fine. Her mind was dormant and buzzing lightly with the fizz of sleep. She'd been down here several hours at least then. They'd entered the abandoned factory in the morning. Keira had just awoken when Rose and the Doctor had gotten the emergency call from Torchwood and they'd barely had time to kiss her goodbye before scooting out the door in the darkness before dawn.

Reaching her mind a bit farther, she also sensed the baby TARDIS in the wood beyond her parents' mansion. The time machine's golden glow brightened a bit as it returned her greeting. The TARDIS seemed sad. She hadn't known an entity like the TARDIS could feel emotions like that, but her brain couldn't seem to focus and soon she gave up on the idea.

She felt herself growing foggy as time passed, still without sound or movement or light. Her eyes rolled back into her head as she lost consciousness for the second time.

****

When she woke again, she was handcuffed to a hospital bed. At least her limbs and eyes and ears seemed to be working again. She worked her wrist in the cuff, frowning. Why would they have her handcuffed to the bed? She remembered being injured, lying under rubble, and nothing else. She couldn't imagine what she'd done to deserve suspicion.

As she caught a glimpse of the back of her hand she did a double take. Her fingernails were longer than she remembered and bare of color. Hadn't she been wearing pink nail varnish? Chipped, two-week-old nail varnish, but she was certain it had been there when she left in the morning. How long had she been in the hospital? Where were the Doctor and Keira and her mum? Why was she alone? She was starting to feel frantic, and no one was in sight to answer her questions. It was just her in what she recognized as one of the stark white Torchwood medical suites. A host of the latest medical equipment, some of it courtesy of alien technology, sat dormant off to one side of the room. Obviously she hadn't been badly injured enough to require it.

"Hey," she called. Her voice was so scratchy it was almost unfamiliar. She willed her mouth to produce enough saliva for her to speak clearly.

The one word had evidently been enough, because she heard the staccato squeaks of someone's trainers running across cheap tile. The door to her suite opened and a man in a white coat ducked his head through. "Oh, she's awake," he said to someone she couldn't see.

After a moment she heard more footsteps and her father walked into the room. He looked tired and sad. He wasn't the still-youthful man she'd known when she first arrived in the parallel universe. More than a decade as the head of Torchwood, making all the difficult decisions no one else wanted to make, had left him prematurely aged. Even so, she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen that level of fatigue in his eyes.

"Dad," she said immediately. "What's going on? What happened? Why - "

He cut her off, his words abrupt and harsh. "Who are you? What have you done with my daughter?"

Rose blinked. Her brain couldn't quite process what he was asking her. It didn't make any sense. "Dad, it's — I'm me, I'm Rose." Her voice was scratchy and squeaky and her throat ached from disuse.

Pete stared at her coldly for several moments. She wanted to ask him all the questions frantically circling her brain, but she knew that look. She'd seen him give it to enemies on more than one occasion. He was working through things in his mind, and he wouldn't tell her anything until he was ready. Finally he spoke, seeming to choose his words with caution. "The Doctor once told me that as his other self, he could grow a new body to save himself from imminent death. He said it was an ability unique to the Time Lords."

She nodded, feeling a sense of dread deep in her belly. If she'd had anything in her stomach she might have been nauseous. "I saw him do it once. The Doctor you met wasn't the first Doctor I knew." Her voice was starting to annoy her, and she cleared her throat several times.

Her father looked at her for a moment more, then produced a small makeup compact from his pocket. She stared at him in befuddlement. "Take a look in the mirror," Pete suggested.

Rose only glanced into it for a moment before dropping it onto the bed in shock. Slowly, she found it with her free hand and brought it back up.

Looking back at her in the mirror was a different woman. Visibly younger, with long dark hair pulled away from her face with a simple rubber band. Everything had changed, from her skin tone to the shape of her face. Too stunned to speak, she dropped the mirror on the bed again.

"Now you can see why we don't really believe you're Rose Tyler," Pete said quietly.

For once she wished she had the Doctor's gob. He was never speechless. Now she was speechless and helpless both. For a woman who had fearlessly traveled between universes, seeing atrocities and wonders alike, it was an unfamiliar feeling. She hadn't experienced this sense of absolute despair since that horrible day she pounded her fists raw on a blank white wall.

The expression on her face must have spoken volumes, because Pete wasn't giving her that cold stare anymore. "Answer me one question," he said softly. Rose nodded. "What was the first thing you ever said to me, when we met all those years ago?"

Rose closed her eyes, remembering a posh party before it erupted into violence and death. "You said something about mum — no, your Jackie's — twenty-first birthday, and then I remembered I was supposed to be a waiter, and I offered you champagne." When she opened them again, she saw a glimmer of tears in Pete's eyes. She continued, her new, scratchy voice quiet. "And you said you might as well drink it, you were paying for it."

Pete sighed and wiped at his eyes. "I believe you, and I think your mum will too. We ran a test of your DNA while you were unconscious, and it's mostly a match for...well, your previous samples. There are some differences, which we'll discuss later. For now, I think you should see your mum."

He turned to leave, clearly not knowing what to do in this situation any more than Rose did.

"Dad," she whispered. "The Doctor...where is he? I can't feel him. Is he hurt?"

Pete turned back to her, his hands clenched into fists. This was obviously a question he'd been hoping she wouldn't ask. Maybe he thought she already knew. "He's dead, Rose. The people who blew up that warehouse — they abducted him and they shot him. We found his body last night."

****

The hours after she learned of her Doctor's death went by in a feverish blur. One of the Torchwood hospital staff came and released her from the handcuffs. Then they brought her a plate of spag bol, which she put aside without so much as a glance. She didn't know what this new body wanted, but food was not it.

Her mother came, tears running down her cheeks, and threw herself onto Rose's bed to wrap her in a hug. Rose stiffened in her embrace, the feeling of her new body within her mother's arms unfamiliar to her. Jackie backed off quickly, seeming to sense that she needed time to adjust. There was a lot to adjust to, after all. Having a different body, a different face, a different voice, a different personality. Being a widow and a single mum. Losing the only man she'd ever loved — could ever love, if what the Doctor had told her about the Gallifreyan marriage bond was to be believed. She asked her mother if anyone had told Keira what was happening. Her mother shook her head and said, "Love, we didn't know what to tell her."

She felt strangely serene about it all, as if it was all happening to someone else. She supposed in a way it was. Rose Tyler was dead, had died in the explosion used as a cover for the Doctor's kidnapping, and now this new girl was in her place. The Doctor had seemed to adapt to his new body so easily. Then again, by the time she'd borne witness to his regeneration, he'd done it nine times already. Perhaps experience made it easier. Or maybe all his babbling about teeth and hair had been a cover for the emotional upheaval encountered by a soul being transplanted whole into a new brain.

Finally left alone, she thought about Keira. How would her little girl react? It wasn't as if they could have warned her about this happening. No, she didn't want to see Keira yet. She was safe enough with Jackie at the mansion for now.

She got up and went to the loo, using it with a comfortingly familiar sense of relief. One thing stayed the same, at least.

Sighing, she took the opportunity to examine her new face and body in the mirror above the sink. She yanked the rubber band from her hair, wincing as it took several hairs with it. Her new hair wasn't bad at all; long and wavy and chestnut. She didn't think she'd ever feel an urge to bleach this mane. It was much better than the mousy brown mop she'd been born with. Gone was her wide smile, replaced with thinner, narrower lips. Her teeth were much straighter and her nose was more substantial. Her face was longer and oval-shaped. Her skin was a bit darker and more olive, and it occurred to her in a far-off way that she would need new makeup. Her old things would never work with this coloring at all. Her eyes, though, were still the same whiskey-brown they'd always been.

She looked a bit younger as well. Her old body had shown every one of its thirty-two years of living, years of stress at Torchwood and dimension-jumping taking its toll, and now she wondered if she could pass for a student still at university. She didn't think she was more or less attractive than she'd been. Just different.

Abruptly she felt that she had spent enough time critiquing her new appearance. She had the strangest niggling feeling in the back of her mind, that something wasn't done. Something left unfinished, but she had no idea what it might be. She sighed again. Was this body a sigher?

Closing the bathroom door behind her, she saw that a new outfit had been laid out on the bed for her. Bemused, she fingered the soft fabrics, and recognized the mark of her mother's more recent sophisticated style. A simple green blouse and black trousers, nothing fancy. Pulling the hospital smock over her head, she slipped into the new garments. They fit her well, and she realized she was quite a bit taller than she used to be. There were no shoes with the outfit, but a pair of plain slippers lay on the floor next to the bed. She slid them on and walked to the door. Nobody had said she couldn't leave the room.

She wanted to see her husband.

****

It took her a good ten minutes of cajoling, but the technician at the Torchwood morgue finally let her in to see him. She knew better than to try to convince them she was Rose, so she merely repeated the line that she had the Director's permission — not strictly true, perhaps, but he hadn't told her she couldn't - until the stubborn man gave in.

They entered the cold, octagonal morgue room. The silence was total within its chilly walls, the only sound the tapping of their shoes on the plain tile. The technician pulled a drawer out of the wall and nodded to her, closing the door behind him and leaving her alone with her husband.

She approached the drawer slowly, knowing what she was going to see but dreading it all the same. He was inside a bag and she had to unzip it, pulling it down past his face and shoulders.

He was still, so still, unmoving as he had never been in life. It was so wrong to see him this way. A part of her expected him to jump up and give her his cheeky grin, chiding her for ever thinking he could really die.

She looked at him closely. She wanted one last picture of him in her head. His skin was greyish and his hair hung limp across his brow. Unable to leave it there, she smoothed it away, flinching at how cold he was. Much colder even than the Time Lord had been. His beautiful brown eyes were closed.

Jamie Noble looked peaceful, at least. She hated to think that he had died alone and scared. They hadn't closed the bullet wound in his temple yet and it had puckered strangely. Rose looked away from the fatal wound, focusing on the plain white wall next to the exit. She closed her eyes and inhaled a shuddering breath.

She still had to tell Keira that her father was dead. Then she had to decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life alone without the only man she'd ever loved.

Rose traced her hand down the Doctor's face and thought that if she did only one thing, she would find his killers and return the favor. She didn't know if it was her new personality taking shape, and she didn't care. The violence of that thought did not bother her. They would die, and she would be there, she saw it clearly in her mind's eye, as though it had already been accomplished.

She leaned down and laid a final kiss on his stiff lips. Never again would he kiss her back with that beautiful mouth of his, the laugh lines around his eyes crinkling as he gave her a fond grin and yanked her into his arms. Never again would he expound on how wonderful human sexuality was, how he felt so much more deeply and fully than he had as a Time Lord. Never again would they leave Keira with Jackie and spend a Saturday afternoon in bed.

Unzipping the bag further, she found his hand and gave it a squeeze. "Goodbye, my Doctor," she told him.