Rose held down the temporal dampener while the Doctor pumped, well, a tall, slightly rusted rod up and down. The shrieking wind of time and space outside of the yellow bubble of dusty energy stuffs made it impossible to yell at him, but more than anything, Rose questioned if her Doctor knew what he was doing as well as his parent Time Lord did. Over the past three years, since she made her choice and decided to share a human lifetime with a man who had all of the Doctor's attitudes, plus a few extra additions thanks to Donna Noble, and memories of her, as well as his love, the Doctor had created a makeshift TARDIS. Oftentimes it broke down, and he yelled at it more fiercely than he would've with his, or rather the other Doctor's, blue box of a TARDIS.
They'd gone to Apalapucia on their honeymoon, enjoyed the exotic, rather freaky gardens, the hiking, everything normal as possible, and experienced not a single strange encounter. The Apalapucians were the sweetest, two-hearted beings.
Of course, when Rose and the Doctor left, time and space dragged them into a black hole. A Rift hole, as the Doctor explained. A rift in the universe was sucking bits of their world into another, and they happened to get caught in its pull, which was strongest on time travelers. It was wibbly wobbly, to be sure, but Rose didn't take her new husband's joke that well. Not when they were falling into yet another alternate reality not even a month after their marriage.
"You get us home, or so help me." Rose couldn't finish her threat because a large shockwave threw her across the metal floor.
Screaming, she grabbed onto the chair that looked so much like the old one in the other TARDIS, the eyesore the Doctor insisted on welding in. Rose had asked what the point was when they never sat. Now she didn't care. Anger surged upward, and she yelled at her husband to do something.
The Doctor yanked a few levers and ran around to the side Rose had manned to press a series of buttons. The TARDIS leveled out and Rose clawed her way up to lean against the chair. A moment later, the turbulence made her cling to the metal pole of the chair all over again, but then they were orbiting Earth. Rose looked up at the Doctor, who was panting as hard as she was, and laughed. He did, too, but his heart — it was hard to adjust to him only having one heart now — wasn't in it like normal.
"Something wrong?"
"That shouldn't have been there." His mouth made that classic quirk and he titled his head slightly. "Other me closed all the rifts."
"Yeah, well, obviously he didn't." She didn't like talking about the original Doctor. Too many mixed feelings.
With a sharp inhale, the Doctor started walking around the main console, glancing at the LED screen he'd rigged into the other scraps of who-knew-what.
"Do you think he missed one?"
"No, it has a different energy signature, and it's behaving, I don't know, like it's having temporal fluctuations in alternating intervals." He made the equally classic, less beloved how-do-I-dumb-this-down face. "It's like it's breathing, and we got caught in an intake."
"But we got out because it let us go and, what, breathed out?" Rose didn't understand it, but she clapped her hands to her thighs. "Right, so what do we do? Can't just leave it breathing out in space, can we?" She smiled, and was rewarded with a half smile from her new spouse.
"We go home."
"What?" Rose grabbed the Doctor by the shoulder. "Why not?"
"Because I'd rather leave it to him."
He meant the Doctor of Pete's World, the Doctor they hadn't met because her Doctor refused to interfere with certain events he knew would attract him. Whenever she questioned why, he said something about paradoxical feedback from being an offshoot of him, but not at the same time, and being in the same place at once would cause bad things to happen. She wasn't sure that was the honest truth. Part of her wondered if he was just scared to see what he might have become and now never would.
"No, we're looking into this." She pressed some buttons, knowing that would set the Doctor into motion. "You're not going to sit back and fuss over this for months."
"Rose, we can't — don't touch that!" He pushed a lever in when a knob she pressed made the TARDIS groan and creak. After a minute of glaring at the console, he made a series of motions, and the TARDIS whined as Earth disappeared. "We're just going to look."
Rose nodded and exchanged a grin with the Doctor as they arrived at their destination.