AN: Doctor Who and all recognizable characters are the sole property of BBC. I have simply taken them out to play with them. No copyright infringement intended.

Finding His Reason

by WhisperingWolf

Prologue

Rose

It had been a year of unending routine, a year that had started out with a strange exchange of words with a strange man on New Year's morning. He had told her that she was going to have a really great year, but she had brushed it off at the time. He had stayed in the shadows, she couldn't even remember having seen his face, but he had sounded sincere at the time. She remembered his words now if only because one single moment, and one chance meeting, had changed everything. She looked down at her left hand for a moment and brushed the fingertips of her right hand over her palm. Nothing had changed, her skin didn't look any different, but still she could feel the strength and energy of his hand gripping hers.

That first instant, in that very first moment she had known that everything was changing, but in a beautiful and exciting way. He was a strange man with bright blue eyes and a black leather jacket. He talked in an odd way with a baritone voice that sounded like cream over chocolates to her, maybe something darker perhaps, and she laughed to herself as she thought of coffee. If she added that in, he became a mocha latte, and she did love a good mocha. Rolling her eyes at her own thoughts, she turned her head and looked back at him over her shoulder.

He was just standing there by the console, his blue eyes watching her as she moved around. He was patient with her as she looked about, letting her get her fill of his time machine, this strange spacecraft that was more than a hundred times bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. He was alien, but that didn't matter to her. In truth, it thrilled her. He was different, and new, and he made her feel . . . alive. More alive than she'd felt in ages. She hadn't thought once about chasing after him, and she didn't regret it one bit.

"You have questions," he stated from behind her, and she turned to face him, her brow arched in curiosity. "You're always talkin' always saying something," he told her as he watched her impassively. "But now you're quiet."

"I'm just taking it all in," she told him, and turned back to the wall she'd been looking at.

Her thoughts drifted back to the morning after the explosion, the morning after she had met him. He had been outside her door and she had found him looking in the cat flap. Her mother had thought she had been subdued because of the shock of seeing her place of work blow up the night before, but the truth was vastly different. She had been thinking about him and the very real thought that she may never see him again, and then there he was.

She could still smell the leather of his jacket, feel it against her hands when she had pulled him into their flat and pushed him down the hall. There had barely been enough room for them to rotate around each other and she had been close enough to smell him. There was something about him, like fire and stars and summer storms all rolled together. A midnight hurricane over the open ocean, with an erupting volcano in the distance, too captivating to turn away. He was exciting, thrilling and dangerous, but he had made her feel safe. They had been running for their lives when she first met him, but still he had made her feel as though nothing bad could happen.

Tipping her head back as she followed the line of twisting coral up from the floor to the high ceiling, she frowned in confusion when she noticed that there was another floor above her. If this wasn't the only level, how high did this ship go? She turned her head back down, frowning as she remembered sitting with the then plastic Mickey in the pizza shop. She was able to say his name now – Jimmy Stone's – without feeling the deep levels of fear and self-hatred that had once plagued her. Well, scrap that, she thought. She was able to say his name as long as she didn't think about him. If for one second she forgot the trick she'd taught herself, forgot to think of only the name like a button on a wall, and not the person that went with it . . .

The Doctor frowned as he studied Rose. From the moment she had agreed to fly with him, and ran on board the TARDIS, she had been excited and full of smiles, but now she wasn't. For just a moment she had fallen, the excitement he could feel from her disappearing into something that looked strangely like despair. Was she regretting her choice to go with him? They hadn't left yet; she could always change her mind and go back. Is that what she wanted?

"We've not really left yet," he told her as he watched her study the wall. "We're just sort of hovering above the Earth." She turned to look at him with a confused frown. "If you wanted to go back," he offered, and watched her give him a slight grin as she arched her brow.

"Did you want me to go then?" she asked him. "If you want to just swan off on your own . . . "

"Didn't say that," he interrupted her. "So you don't want to go back then?"

"Not on your life," she told him, offering him a wide smile and watching with delight as he returned it with equal brilliance.

"What do you want to do then?" he asked her, and watched her look around the TARDIS.

"We're hovering above the Earth?" she asked him, and watched him nod. "How far?"

"A fair bit," he told her, and watched as her eyes seemed to sparkle, the light and excitement returning to her face.

"Can I see it?" she asked him, and watched as his eyes widened. "On the monitor thing then?" she asked when he began pressing buttons.

"Oh Rose, I can give you so much more than that," he told her as he came around the console, and held out his hand to her. "Do you trust me?"

"Yeah," she nodded with confused frown even as she smiled. "Yeah, I really do."

She did trust him, but she couldn't say why she did. He had saved her life as equally as she had saved his, but there was something more to it than that. It was something more powerful, something deeper as though she'd been waiting for him. Her mum would think that she had truly gone mad if she ever said anything like that out loud. A strange man with dark hair and blue eyes who wears a leather coat; oh she knew exactly what her mother would say to that. For all that she'd put her mother through, she couldn't blame her either. She was too distracted by her own thoughts to see The Doctor's frown of concern, following him as he pulled her along behind him.

It happened again, just then. She had been happy and excited, fairly glowing with energy one moment and the next she was subdued and quiet, lost in her own little world. What was she thinking? What was it that took away her happiness so easily, so completely? He was about to ask for her thoughts when she looked up to notice him watching her. She smiled then, squeezing his hand as she did so, but he could tell that it had been forced. Well at least it had for the first moment or so, after that the excitement returned, and she seemed to remember where she was.

"Close your eyes, Rose Tyler," The Doctor said as he pulled her closer to him by their joined hands.

Part of her wanted to question him, another part wanted to say no, but she quieted them both and did as he asked. Jimmy had made her hate being surprised. Mickey had never been able to keep a secret long enough for it to be a secret, and her Mum? Jackie Tyler had never been gifted with keeping quiet about anything. But this strange man, this alien, this . . . Doctor, he had surprised her at every turn, eyes open, or closed and she had loved it. She found that she didn't have to want to be surprised by him because he was always surprising her with his wit, or his knowledge and it made her feel invigorated. He gave her a purpose, even in just those few short hours that she had been with him, running and fighting alongside him, he had made her life mean something.

"All right, just sit down now," The Doctor guided her with his voice, smiling at the strength of her grip on his hand as she gingerly lowered herself to the floor.

There was a ledge that she could feel, and she bit her lip as she bent over to see if it would be safe to hang her legs over it, but felt his large hands grip her waist to hold her still. He told her it was safe and she trusted him. He had protected her all this time and even if he'd made fun of her, or called the human race a bunch of stupid apes, she still knew that he would never let her fall. She felt his legs frame her hips as he sat behind her, his arms wrapping around her waist and found that she didn't feel nervous at all with his closeness. In some ways, it felt as though he had always been there, even if they'd only just met.

"Open your eyes, Rose," he commanded gently, his mouth next to her ear.

Dark black lashes, inked thick with mascara, fluttered open slowly to reveal milk chocolate eyes. Full lips colored in rose-petal pink gloss parted slowly as she stared in wonder and disbelief. She didn't dare look down to confirm what she already knew, she was sitting on the edge of the TARDIS, her legs hanging outside the open door. In front of her was the wide expanse of space and it looked so much different than the night sky when she had looked up from the Earth. The Earth . . .

Her breath caught in her throat as she stared at the planet she called home. She could see the continents, the blue of the waters and the white of the clouds. It moved below her, the atmosphere shifting and swirling as the clouds moved and grew thick. Her brows furrowed as she leaned closer as though she would be able to see it better and felt The Doctor tighten his arms around her to keep her safe. She turned her head back to look at him as she lifted her hand to point at what she was looking at and felt him chuckle behind her even as his humor remained silent.

"There's a storm brewin' over Edinburgh," he told her, with that tone that said he knew more than everyone else, but she didn't mind it. His arrogance was well deserved and in some ways endearing. "You can't see it from here, but they're getting a fair bit of rain right now."

"And that's Mars," she said with wonder nodding at the red planet she could see in the distance. "They're not just dots up here. Blimey, no wonder you don't keep your feet on the ground."

The Doctor took his sonic screwdriver from his coat pocket, changing a few settings before pressing a button and pointing it over his shoulder at the TARDIS. Rose gasped when the TARDIS moved, spinning around to face the opposite direction, her hands gripping his knees tightly as she feared being tossed from her seat. Slipping the sonic back into his inner coat pocket, he chuckled and wrapped his arm around her once more. He felt her intake of breath, her ribs expanding, but she held it, the air never passing back through and he tipped his head to look at her.

"Are you crying?" he asked her with confusion.

"No," she said with a sniffle, and caught her tears with her fingertips before they could ruin her mascara. "Maybe," she allowed. "It's . . . beautiful."

He spoke to her softly as he lifted his hand out in front of them both, pointing to each one as he named the planets and their moons. There was an asteroid belt to their left and he pointed to it, telling her its name and history. She thought they'd be at the wrong angle to see the Big Dipper, but suddenly the TARDIS moved again and she didn't understand why they weren't thrown back into the ship considering that she knew they had to be tipped up on its side.

"Gravity field," he told her when she squeezed his knees in a desperate grip. "You won't fall. The TARDIS keeps the gravity however it's needed. Right now it's keeping us here, sitting and staring up at the stars."

She leaned back against him, relaxing slowly as she let herself believe that she was safe in his care. Her hands remained on his knees, simply resting there and sliding up to the tops of his thighs as she relaxed her arms. He didn't say anything, strangely didn't find her touch alarming, or uncomfortable. They sat in a companionable silence for a while, and he listened to her heartbeat as they watched the planets move around their orbits. He lifted his hand, taking hers and curling his fingers around hers in a loose fist as he lifted them together and pointed at the stars that formed the constellations humans were so used to seeing.

He named the stars for her, told her the myths of each one, and met her with a smile when she asked if any of them held alien life. He laughed when she asked if Neptune had water life forms, or Jupiter gaseous ones. Shaking his head as he told her that the closest habitable planets were more than a few hundred light years away. He denied her belief that it would be too far away to visit, reminding her that they were in a time machine, a ship that traveled between the dimensions of space and time. Distance and time, those things meant nothing to the TARDIS.

She could go anywhere with him, see different worlds, different places, different people. She wasn't scared to be with him, she wasn't afraid to run away, or go anywhere with him. She was excited and ready for the adventure. She shivered just a bit and felt him move behind her, his arms going around hers and folding over her chest as he tried to keep her warm. She frowned as she turned back and looked at him with a question in her eyes.

"Ask it," he told her, his mouth tipped up in a lopsided grin.

"You're not . . . warm," she said, and watched him tip his head as he gave her a goofy grin.

"Not as such. Not as you lot are used to," he answered her, and saw that she was still waiting for an explanation. "My body temperature is roughly thirty degrees below yours. More than that actually. Normal body temperature for me is sixty degrees Fahrenheit ."

"Sixty?" Rose said with wide eyes. "Best not pass out drunk anywhere; they'll think you're dead!"

The Doctor laughed as he lifted his brows and nodded, the expression one that she was growing used to. It was his way of agreeing with her and also his way of saying that something was fantastic without actually saying the word. She stared at him with wonder as she tried to sort out her own thoughts and understand what couldn't be explained. She'd always had trouble reading people, but somehow this alien Doctor, and all of his expressions and silent communication, was familiar to her. How did she understand him so well when she'd never understood anyone else so easily? Who was this man, and why did it feel like she belonged with him?