They stand on a beach. It is barren, and cold, and the salt-wind blows their hair into their faces.
Rose Tyler has a ring on her finger and two heart-shaped lockets around her neck, one gold and one silver. One holds a photograph of John and her, not long after they were left together on this same beach. It's a photo-booth picture, and their arms are wrapped around each other. In it, her eyes are closed. Her head rests on his shoulder. John's eyes are closed as well, and he's smiling contentedly, an expression the other him never made. His chin rests on her bottle-blonde hair. They look completely in love.
The second locket holds a picture much like the same, but there are slight differences. Lines in his once-ageless face, flecks of silver at his hairline. There are wrinkles around her eyes and her smile. They are still in love.
Rose Tyler stands on a beach with the Doctor. Her husband isn't there.
Her husband is dead.
She looks at this new Doctor with a new face, so much younger and yet so much older, and it shouldn't make sense, but it does. This is not John; this is not her husband. He may have been borne of battle, but this Doctor was forged in hopelessness.
"What happened to him?" the Doctor asks softly.
"Torchwood," she replies, and he casts away his gaze.
He sent away the 4-5-6 at the cost of his life. Too human to survive that amount of psychic channelling, the voices of all the children in the world. Their voices had mingled in something like a scream. She'd watched him collapse on the other side of the glass, helpless to do anything, and Pete had held her as she'd sobbed.
Has this Doctor fought the 4-5-6? Rose wonders. Was that how he regenerated? Or did he survive it as easily as a bit of radiation?
She locks the thought away as deep in her head as she can. It's pointless.
(And, besides, what if he hears?)
The Doctor is not her husband. He is cold, in more ways than one. She'd gotten used to the human heat of John's hand (and what a strange thing to get used to), and then she'd gotten used to nothing at all, an empty chair in the sitting room, a side of the bed which remains untouched. The Doctor, when he hugs her, is cold in a way that is more than nothingness but not as much as a person.
She doesn't know how much of that is the temperature and how much of it is his distance. She doesn't want to know.
The Doctor, when she'd been with him still, was always in the back of her head, a warm, comforting presence that translated alien speech, that told her the history of where-ever they were without a word passing between them.
This Doctor, this new and utterly alien Doctor, is not in her head. He's closed off, like a museum exhibit; an ancient artefact in a glass case.
"Goodbye, Rose. Arkytior." And he walks away.
She recognises the word. John had called her that sometimes, had told her the story of a Gallifreyan girl lost to the stars. Her namesake, in some odd, cosmic way; Time's way of telling a war-torn Doctor that all was not lost. Rose.
She realises, in a flash of something like horror, that this new face is still the same man. That this is the closest she'll ever get to holding John again, to talking to him. "Wait!" she calls.
The Doctor stops and turns. "The universes will correct themselves soon. You'll be returned to your own world."
"But not yet," she insists, and holds out her hands. "We have a few minutes."
She doesn't think, for a moment, that he'll come, but he does. He clasps her hands in his, large and thin-fingered and familiar in their unfamiliarity. He rubs his thumbs over her knuckles, and with the contact of bare skin, a link something like the one they once shared without touch bursts into life in the back of her mind. She can feel him. He's fractured, and though the shards have melded back together, they've left sharp edges at imperfect junctions, and fissures which trickle pain and sorrow and hatred.
Her breath scratches in her throat, and her eyes sting; the precursors of tears. "Will I ever see you again?" she asks, even as she feels him become insubstantial, and her fingers dig into air where she still sees his hands.
"One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. One day." He smiles, and it's full of self-deprecation. "It might be a week from now, or a year, or a decade, but you'll see me again."
He fades away entirely, and she stands alone on the beach. She never does see him.
(A century from now, a man nobody recognises lays roses at a grave.)