When she finds him again, she is alone, and distraught, and stranded on 21st century Earth in the middle of London without a single pound to her name, with only a sonic screwdriver and an empty mind and a severed bond that will never stop screaming. Her daughters are gone, taken by some woman who wants a weapon and decided that the Time Ladies would be perfect. Wherever they, and their TARDIS, have been taken, she can no longer feel them in her mind. Her husband is long dead, ashes scattered above an Earth that is a universe away. It is late, and the streets are quiet and dusted with snow, and Rose Tyler is just searching for a cash point to sonic and a hotel to sleep in when across the road, she sees an older looking man with icy blue eyes and she cannot look away, feels drawn to him like she hasn't felt drawn to anyone in decades.
When he finds her again, he's wandering the streets of London at Christmastime, alone, so alone, locked out of the TARDIS, missing a girl he cannot remember, aching still from the aftermath of a long night amongst the stars while the Towers sang… London is the last place he wants to be. It brings up too many memories of Christmas dinner, paper crowns, a blonde long lost to him. When he sees her crossing the street, towards him, with a confused look on her face, he is certain he is dreaming. Positive that 4.5 billion years smashing through a diamond wall, a memory wipe, and at last completing the circle of himself and River was causing him to hallucinate. So he pretends he doesn't see her, and bumps into her to discern if she's solid, physically real, not just a figment of his own tired mind.
He was no one, she told herself repeatedly. But then they knock into each other, and her bare finger brushes against his wrist, and the aching in her mind vanishes, the shattered bond reaching out.
She freezes.
So does he.
"You're real," he breaths. Scottish, she notes.
"You're him," she whispers back. "Really, properly him. I feel you."
"I'm not dreaming. This isn't a hallucination brought on by the memory wipe. You—Rose Tyler," and the voice is different but the way his tongue caresses her name still sends shivers down her spine.
"My Doctor," she answers, and suddenly she's in his arms, listening to the double beat of his hearts, and crying for the first time since she watched him die.
He feels the double beat of two hearts against his chest, and he stills. "Rose." And It's all he needs to say, and she presses her fingers against his cheek and he's flooded with memories, all of them, since that bloody beach.
"Jenny, and Alexis," he says after a moment. The names of her—their—children.
"Not the last," she tells him, and there it is, that signature Rose Tyler grin, and he gives in to impulse and kisses it, chasing that hint of tongue back into her mouth. She moans and melts into him, and he feels the partial bond suddenly snap complete. She gleams gold in his mind, and even though there are two Time Ladies with his genes out there taken captive by a woman whom he knows well, who wants to kill him, and who now has control of a TARDIS, he feels more at home than he has in billions of years.
