She still smells like applegrass.
He's not quite sure how she does that - it's been years and years now, for both of them, since she last set foot on New Earth, and he has no way of knowing whether or not this universe even has a New Earth. He's tempted to find out - to grab her hand, dash back to the TARDIS, and forget what temporal anomaly, what rip in space-time, brought him to this place and just…stay.
It would be so easy.
The slim band of gold on her left hand stops him, though - a stark reminder of the reason he'd left her here in the first place. And so instead, the Doctor leans against the counter of a small diner, adjusts his bow-tie, and listens to Rose Tyler babble happily about travelling abroad with her husband over a basket of chips.
"Oh, that's brilliant," he says with a grin as she finishes a tale about accidentally crash landing in a little girl's garden. (Her husband, in this tale, pilots a zepplin, but he has lived this story and he sees the truth behind her eyes. She is so, so happy, and he thrives on it.) In response he launches into a heavily edited tale of the time he and Amy met Elizabeth X, and he cannot help the grin from spreading across his face in response to hers as he waves his hands about, trying to adequately describe the disgusting experience of being swallowed whole by a whale.
"You," she says, tongue poking between her teeth. "Are joking. You have to be!"
He lets her think he is. She doesn't show any sign of recognizing him, and while it hurts - while every second is a battle not to wrap her up in his arms, to plead with her it's me, Rose, it's me, he holds his tongue. Instead, he orders her another basket of chips and begs her for another story, anything to keep hearing her voice.
"Oh, you flirt," she says, swatting his arm. "My husband's supposed to be here soon, you know. You should meet him. He'd like you."
No, he thinks, he wouldn't, but he doesn't say it out loud. Doesn't say that if he were the other him, his worst fear would be this, what is happening right now. What he does is check in with the TARDIS - several miles away, but still an ever-present buzz in his mind. She gives him a reluctant sort of hum, letting him know that all is well, and that he can return to his own universe any time that he likes.
"I'd better not, Rose Tyler," he says, giving her a warm smile, memorizing every feature. He leans down to press a to her cheek, and the temptation for it all to come spilling out nearly overtakes him, but he simply lingers a little longer than is entirely proper for someone you've just met in a diner.
"Lots of things to do, people to see. It was wonderful meeting you."
"I'll see you again, though?"
He turns to look at her. Radiant, is the word, shining and beautiful and every part of him aches to touch every part of her. She looks so much better than he saw her last, all thinness and hard lines from years of heartache and stress. This Rose Tyler is happy, and he has made her that way.
"Oh, yes," he says, and then, under his breath, he mumbles "Geronimo."
And exits the Diner as quickly as he dare without looking impolite.
A few moments later, Rose Tyler's head jerks up from her cell phone as she hears a familiar noise just outside the diner. It goes all strange and - doubled - for a moment, before righting itself and landing properly, and her eyes linger at the diner's door before a mad-haired man in a pinstriped suit bounds through it.
She's scooped up in his arms before she can get a word in, and then her mouth is occupied.
"Miss me?" she says finally, when they're separated.
"Who me? No, not at all," he dives in for another kiss. "Well, maybe." And another. "Sort of." Another. "Barely at all."
She swats him away before they're asked to leave, and slide into a booth where he orders food and she sips on a soda. He tells her all about the revolution on New Earth, and how he'd really very much needed her there after all, as he'd ended up walking right into a nest of several foul-tempered members of the Slitheen family. They giggle for a few moments over the new story and several old jokes, and then he reaches across and grabs her hand - the one with the matching wedding band on it.
"So tell me," he says, raising her hand to his lips. "Did the Defender of the Earth do any defending while I was away?"
"Not really," she says. "But I did meet a man who called himself Rory Williams.