For the longest time I actually thought we were never going to see Rose again after Doomsday. Thank God for Bing Images that let me find a screenshot of Rose and Metacrisis, or I would have stumbled, broken-hearted, through the next season-and-a-half. It seems that a lot of people think Metacrisis is a cheap copy and therefore not worth noting, but personally I'm shocked that he doesn't get more attention. I think he's adorable as a little puppy and unique to the point of being a total mystery; it's like he's the Ninth Doctor, the Tenth Doctor, Donna, and a brand-new rejuvenation, all mixed into one. I really don't see why anybody could say he's not the Doctor when clearly he is, just with a chance at the life the Doctor has always wanted with the woman who is his soul mate.
Long story short, Metacrisis and Rose are, in my mind, a beautiful love story. I hope that someday there might be more of them in the show. If not, though, I still have headcanon...

With You I Am Home

"Just let me know when to ask you."

"Hm?"

Rose hummed a slow reply, blinking to dispel the peaceful daze that had settled over her. She pulled her eyes away from the café tabletop, where her fingers had been toying lazily with his upturned hand, to look into the face that she had missed for so long but had never given up finding again.

"Ask me what?" she pressed curiously, with a wide smile that had returned with him.

He (John Smith, Time Turner, Metacrisis, The Doctor) was smiling softly, and it was familiar in so many ways (how it enhanced his boyish good looks and made the whole universe seem like a whole lot of fun) but unfamiliar in just as many others (how it curved upward at both sides instead of just one and gave his eyes a brand-new sort of life she couldn't remember seeing before).

Time let his gaze drop down, the gentle smile still there, lighting up everything. (Where he had gotten the name "Time Turner" from was a mystery he had yet to explain, and it was a ridiculous first name, but somehow they both called him by it anyway.) He twisted their hands together so he could stroke the backs of her fingers with his thumb.

She found her own smile quite impossible to restrain as she watched him, as his really great hair bristled in an early-autumn breeze and moved perfectly with it, like always. Still the same but so different. New new new Doctor. She wondered why she had ever doubted this one. He was fantastic.

Another few heartbeats of silence, with the noises of the city street faint in the background.

"I know we have to wait an appropriate time," he said, and the word had almost become a joke between them (which might have accounted for the "Time Turner" thing), but still he seemed so serious under the smile, "plus your mum would probably throw me out of the manor if I even so much as suggested it before a year or two, not to mention your dad. It really makes no difference to me, Rose Tyler."—Oh, how she loved it when he said her whole name like that.—"Just let me know when to ask you."

"Ask me what?" she laughed, and really she should have figured it out by then, but in her defense she was still processing the fact that she was actually able to kiss the madman any time she liked.

"Well, to marry me."

Her smile disappeared in a wide-eyed stare; she held her breath in expectancy, but when Time was joking, he often looked straight at her and quirked his ridiculously expressive eyebrows. This time he did no such thing, only continued to smooth his fingers across her hand, looking down again to stare at it in a way she'd only ever seen him stare at the key to the TARDIS.

It was a while before she realized neither of them had spoken, but before she could open her mouth to respond adequately, he apparently noticed as well, because he looked up once more and held their hands still. His smile was still so very Doctor, big and confident and untroubled, but she could see it in the intensity of his eyes—the tiny trace of insecurity, a question of why she did not reply and a worry that he might have spoken too soon.

Suddenly feeling very shy—something she had never been with any version of him, proof of how new and brilliant what they had was—Rose wrapped her other hand around his in a message he was sure to understand, loud and clear.

"What would I be called, then?" she beamed playfully. "Rose Smith, or Rose Turner…? That's not very different from my name now, actually. It has a nice sound to it, Rose Turner."

He beamed back, all traces of doubt gone, his right hand coming up to stroke her hair and face (because, apparently, he was still processing as well).

"Whatever you want," he enunciated a little loudly. "Whatever you want, Rose. Anything."

And he meant it, she knew. She would never forget those words he had whispered in her ear that day at Bad Wolf Bay. This universe could slowly come to know him as anything it wanted, call him by any name it learned, whether it was the old "Doctor" or something as unique as he was. No matter what strange and incredible things would happen next, nothing and no one would ever be able to get between them now. There would never be another rejuvenation, or another companion; it was only the two of them.

She had accidentally found adventure in a department store basement and travelled through time and space and parallel universes and The Void; he had been created through an impossible connection between nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord DNA and single-hearted human DNA…and they were here, at a café in windy London, holding hands at lunch hour. It didn't seem like it should exist, not at all, not even in a dream.

And that was exactly why she was absolutely going to marry him.

So, the "Time Turner" thing...my youngest sister adores My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. If you're a Doctor Who fan and know anything about My Little Pony, you're eventually going to learn about Time Turner, aka "Dr. Whooves," the mysterious pony with a messy brown mane, whose "soul symbol" is an hourglass. Any time he's present, this particular pony is always in the background, especially, it seems, in the middle of an emergency, and there was that one time when he was an Earth pony (just a regular horse) in one episode and then suddenly had changed (rejuvenated?) into a Pegasus (horse with wings) in the next. It's said that he is seen in other episodes as well, but in different forms (such as resembling the Fifth Doctor instead of the Tenth, etc.), but all we really know is that he's rumored to be the time-setter of Ponyville, making sure all the clocks work properly (and also fighting off Weeping Pegasuses, apparently). The Metacrisis Doctor just didn't look like a "John Smith" to me, so I figured hey. Why not.
(Also the title of this one-shot comes from "Home" by Vanessa Carlton. I can never resist sharing my music with my readers.)
Au revoir jusqu'a la prochaine fois que nous rencontrons. (I probably mistranslated all of that.)