The Cure
By Hazelmist
A/N: Wrote this Tentoo/Rose drabble for the prompt "Complications"
"He developed some complications…"
They don't have the "Oxford" dictionary on Pete's world, but the definitions and the rules don't change. They're the same as they were in hers and they're inescapable. The Doctor looks and acts exactly like the Timelord from her universe, but he's not. He's human, but on some instinctive level he still sees his mortality as a minor complication that he'll overcome.
And now, ten years afterlanding on this planet, he could be dying, because he got too close to a bloody alien.
The irony is not lost on them, but there's nothing funny about his prolonged exposure to a foreign bacteria and a potentially deadly virus. Two other people are dead because they came into direct contact with it, and the Doctor could be next.
He's immediately quarantined. Torchwood tests, examines and clears her and everyone else that could've had contact with him and his team. But it's not contagious. It's already contained and imprisoned in the mind of the last and only remaining living person that touched it.
"Doctor." Rose presses her palm to the bullet proof glass.
He looks through the window, but he doesn't see her.
"Doctor, it's me."
He hears her, but he doesn't understand.
There's a team of scientists working on trying to figure out what's currently going on inside that man's head. The Doctor would've known what to do, but he's slowly succumbing to the same fatal paralysis that shut down the brains of the other two.
Rose is the only one who might be able to reach him now.
"Talk to him," they tell her. "Just keep talking to him."
So she does.
But he won't answer her.
After fifteen minutes of one-sided pleading, affirmations of love, endearments, and shared memories of the life they've built, Rose realizes this won't work. She won't reach him through a fortified piece of glass that nothing but a microphone can penetrate. There's still a wall between them.
"Let me in there," she begs.
They refuse. She could die. She could spread the virus. They don't know how he'll react. He could kill her.
"I don't care."
She forces her way into the room and approaches a blank-faced man with dead eyes; a shell of the man she loved for fourteen years. But she knows that he's in there, and that if she could just –
She lifts her hands and places her index fingers on his temples.
"Come back to me, Doctor."
Somehow she delves into the depths of his mind. Minutes, maybe hours pass. She breaks down barriers at the risk of losing and poisoning herself, but finally there's the glowing residue of a Timelord and a shimmer of light. The Doctor touches her temples and rests his forehead against hers.
"Rose Tyler," he whispers, speaking for the first time in seventeen hours. They'll develop an antidote but she's the cure. Rose cries in relief and he kisses away the tears.
There are complications, he's still human, but he survives.