Rose woke up with the impression that she'd just had a very nice dream. She couldn't remember it, not exactly, but its aftertaste sort of hovered round the edges of her consciousness, fizzing like the last dregs of a soft drink, filling her with a sense of contentment and deep, deep rest. It made it almost impossible for her to feel her usual amount of dread that morning.
Almost.
Rose let out a long, sleep-filled sigh, stretching her limbs as far as she could, her fingers reaching to the ceiling, her toes straining toward the end of the bed. She flopped back on her cushy mattress with her limbs splayed like a snow-angel, tried not to think about how the only reason she could take up so much room in her own bed was because she didn't share it with anyone, and she tried not to hear the lonely, oppressive silence that always blanketed her home. Instead she settled back in her bedclothes, nestling into the downy duvet tangled up in cottony sheets, and contemplated, for the smallest of moments, the various pros and cons of playing hooky.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd had such a nice sleep.
And she sort of hated to waste such a delicious feeling on a day of hard, likely pointless work. But the stars were going out, and they didn't care if she secretly wanted to take a health day, just this once.
With a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan, Rose threw her legs over the side of the bed and pushed onto her feet. She wavered for just a moment, her head swimming as it protested her sudden movement. She peeled off her blouse and trousers—she had collapsed in bed almost fully-clothed, how tired had she been, anyway, and goodness, how had she gotten her clothes so dirty?—and slipped out of her bra and pants, grabbing a pair of knickers out of the clean laundry pile that had somehow never been distributed to the wardrobe or chest or shelves. She shuffled to the toilet down the hall and stepped into the shower, turning the knob as far left as it would go.
Indulgent showers were a luxury she'd long denied herself, insisting they weren't worth the time, but it felt so wonderful, the hot, nearly scalding water hammering against her head and neck and shoulders, coating her head and hair and running down her back, that Rose just stood in place for what felt like hours.
So she'd be a few minutes late today. What was Oliver going to do, fire her?
She squeezed shampoo into her hands and savored the feel of the smooth, cool gel against her overheated palms. She massaged shampoo and conditioner into her hair and dug her nails and knuckles into her scalp, forcing herself to take long, steady breaths in and out, as the tension melted from her muscles and swirled away down the drain. She splashed water on her face and scrubbed at her smudged makeup until her face stung. She took a flannel and raked it over her entire body until every square inch of flesh was tender and red and raw.
Rose couldn't remember the last time she'd felt so good.
After the shower, she gently rubbed lotion into her skin, the nice kind her mum had got for her at one of the fancy places she could afford now. Usually Rose just stuck with the drugstore stuff (you can take the girl out of the Estate, but you can't take the Estate out of the girl), but today, she just sort of felt like pampering herself a little bit. Today, she would take the long shower and use the fancy lotion and probably ignore the fancy perfume but use the nice fluffy towels. Today she deserved it, dammit.
Rose wiped a shiny trail across her fog-covered mirror and took a good long look at her reflection, another luxury she'd mostly denied herself for a while now. A wet-haired, bright-eyed Rose stared back at her. She was thinner now than she'd ever been. Not bad-thin. Fit-thin. But Jackie still fussed over her something terrible. Her rounded baby fat was gone, replaced by strength and sinew and cheekbones and sheer resolve.
It made Rose uncomfortable, sometimes, how much she'd changed since she first came to this new universe. But other days, like today, she liked this new Rose. This confident, take-charge, knowledgeable Rose. This Rose that couldn't be stopped.
"Today," she told her reflection quietly. "You're gonna get back on that horse." That stupid, stupid horse. "Today you're gonna go home."
It was a version of a speech Rose had told herself many, many times over the last year or so, with varying degrees of believability. But today, after a good night's sleep and a lovely shower and the pleasant smell of fancy lotion lingering on the air, Rose could almost think it was true.
She finished drying her hair and slipped on her fresh knickers and wrapped one of the soft, fluffy mint-green towels round her body, lazily tucking the corner under her arm. Sometimes she didn't mind wandering about her little cottage in nothing but her skin—after years of living with a mother and later a hopelessly asexual Time Lord, there was something very liberating in being naked in her home whenever she felt like it—but she didn't much fancy the shock of cold air on her breasts or buttocks today. She left the bath and walked down the hall toward the kitchen, shivering all the while, her bare feet leaving little damp ghost-impressions on the hardwood floors.
Rose yawned again, stretched again, opened a cupboard, and grimaced. Of course the cupboards were bare, except for some stale biscuits and a moldering pot of something that had surely once been jam. She sighed. She wasn't sure what else she'd expected. With an under-the-breath grump to herself, she pulled the stale biscuits out from their hiding place and unrolled the packaging, the plastic-paper crinkling loudly under her fingertips.
"Good morning!" a cheery voice erupted from the sitting-room, and Rose couldn't remember the last time she'd screamed so loudly.
"What? What is it?" the voice asked, concerned, and a familiar mop of tousled brown hair popped up over the back of Rose's couch, followed by an even more familiar face. The Doctor regarded Rose with no small measure of worry, slender face framing wide brown eyes and a questioning mouth.
The Doctor. On Rose's couch. In Rose's cottage. In Rose's universe.
"Erm," Rose said.
"Sorry, did I startle you?" the Doctor asked, running a hand over his face and through his hair. "Might have kipped off there for a bit, body's a bit knackered what with just being born and all. It's a surprisingly exhausting process, being born. Or regenerated. Or metacrisised, as the case were. And what's more, this body doesn't seem to have any respect for normal human circadian rhythms. Suppose that's something I'll have to work on. Am I going to have to sleep eight hours a night now? Seems like such a waste of time. Which I haven't exactly got a surplus of, anymore, although really, it's probably for the best, imagine I've already had more time than I need, though I must say, the looming prospect of mortality is not something I'm looking forward to confronting. Blimey, that's a bit dark for morning conversation. Bit of a downer, isn't it?"
Rose just stood in her kitchen, the biscuit wrapper idle in her hands, her thoughts ambling through her mind at a speed of precisely one mile per hour. This had to be some kind of strange dream, didn't it?
"You're in my cottage," she said, feeling a bit stupid.
The Doctor's face broke into a nervous grin. "You forgot I was here, didn't you?"
"No," Rose lied.
The Doctor quirked an eyebrow at her.
"No, I didn't forget you were here," Rose said, struggling to find words as the memories of the last few days came rushing into her brain with almost painful speed and urgency. Time jumps, dimension hops, Daleks, and killer mold from another universe. Angry bosses and lost jobs and all the stars coming back. Mickey leaving and the Doctor staying. "I just sort of...didn't remember it."
"Ah. Important distinction, that."
"Very," Rose agreed.
The Doctor's smile grew genuine, and Rose matched it with one of her own. "Good morning," she said.
"Good morning," he replied.
A bit of silence stretched between them. Rose suspected she should fill it with words, but couldn't think of any to say.
"I hope you don't mind—"
"I sort of took the liberty of—"
They both started and stopped and laughed a little. Rose watched the Doctor in her peripheral vision, suddenly shy. She had a feeling very similar to when one wakes up an hour early for work and goes through all the motions, only to find that they have a secret special bonus hour after all. Disorientating, but nice.
She tucked a tendril of damp hair behind one ear and became acutely aware of how little she was wearing. She willed her body not to flush with embarrassment and something else. She felt grateful that she'd decided not to dance around her cottage completely naked. "I should..." she started to say, and gestured back toward her room.
The Doctor watched her patiently, waiting for the end of her sentence.
"...you know. Go change. Put clothes on. I mean, I've got clothes on. I mean, some clothes—"
"Oh, you don't have to," the Doctor interrupted.
Now it was Rose's turn to raise an eyebrow at him.
"I should say, it's your home, and you should be comfortable," the Doctor said quickly, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Says the man who passed out on the couch all night," Rose laughed, taking in the sight of the Doctor's rumpled suit and sleep-flattened hair at the back of his head. "Didn't I show you the guest bed?"
"Yes, and I'm sure it's lovely, but I couldn't sleep," the Doctor said. "Well. Until I could, anyway. It sort of snuck up on me. Does it always happen like that for humans?"
Rose shrugged. "Sometimes. Don't knock it, though. Sometimes you take what you can get."
"Hmmm, and I seem to remember you taking quite a lot. Do you still sleep an average of eleven hours a day?"
"Oi, I do not sleep eleven hours a day," Rose insisted.
The Doctor glanced pointedly at the clock over the oven. Rose looked at the time. It had been just about eleven and a half hours since she'd collapsed into bed the night before. The Doctor's grin grew smug.
"Okay, I normally don't sleep eleven hours a day," Rose told him. "S'been more like four or five, lately. Didn't even think I could sleep that long anymore."
"Rose Tyler on four or five hours of sleep. Now that is frightening."
"And you can't judge me for sleeping like that on the TARDIS, anyway. Not with all your talks about 'the relativity of time' and the TARDIS's 'internal quantum barometer' and 'Oh look Rose, it's not been twelve hours, it's been twelve months!'"
The Doctor cringed. "You said you wouldn't bring that up again."
Rose shook her head and chuckled and made her way over to the couch, her fingers tunneling inside the biscuit-wrapper in a vain attempt to find the treats at the bottom. "Oh, no. I said no such—"
Her feet reached the edge of her sitting-room rug and her body halted along with her speech. The view of her sitting-room floor had been blocked by the couch and the kitchen counter and her still-packed bags, but now she could see a mass of deconstructed electronics and appliances littering the carpet, couch, and coffee-table, a battlefield of speaker skeletons and husks of DVD players and Playstation controllers and cracked-open clock radios with circuitboard and wire guts spilling out. Amongst the fallen, Rose could spot the remains of Tony's old baby monitor, Mickey's old Gamegirl (one of several differences in this universe that had made Mickey pout and Rose cackle with delight), Pete's old printer, and more. Some of the pieces had been globbed together with screws and electrical tape to create little electronic Frankenstein's creatures; in one such piece, an old outdated mobile had merged with an electronic thermometer and the organs of Rose's microwave in something that looked like it belonged in a Tim Burton film. Rose couldn't imagine what function such an item would hold, but then again, if the Doctor cobbled it together, then it probably either leveled continents or made tea.
"—thing," Rose finished finally, thinking that tea sounded like a really good idea right about now, except, oh wait, there was the tea kettle on the carpet, nestled snugly between the corpse of her shredder and something that used to be her blender, with its lid missing and its metal spout torn off.
On the upside, though, there were no crumbs or stains on the carpet—he'd cleaned everything before destroying it. How strangely thoughtful of him. She might have lost 75% of her electronics, but at least she wouldn't get mice.
"Erm, like I said, I couldn't get to sleep for a while," the Doctor explained, watching Rose's face anxiously as she tiptoed around the edge of the electronics pile, hoping her electric razor or other more private toys hadn't ended up in there somehow. "And I thought your television might benefit from some twenty-second-century upgrades, but to do that, I'd really need a signal booster from Carpath VII, except I haven't got any way to get there now, but you can sort of jury-rig one from the insides of a twenty-first century radio and a microwave, and also I thought your DVD player could use a tune-up..."
He buried his face in his hands. "...and I realize now I probably should have asked. Bit of an oversight on my part. Suppose I'll have to get used to things not being mine."
"I do wish you'd asked first," Rose agreed, plucking her gutted electric razor out of the fray with a heavy sigh. "But a lot of this stuff isn't really mine. It's mostly hand-me downs from Mum and Pete, and it's mostly junk. And anyway, it's more sort of ours, right?"
He peeked at her through the gaps between his fingers. "'Ours'?"
Rose shrugged. "I mean, you haven't got anything with you except the clothes on your back."
"Quite literally."
"So I guess we'll have to share things, won't we?"
The Doctor fiddled with the device sitting in his lap, a patchwork design lovingly stitched together from a digital camera and a computer mouse and a novelty 3d printer pen Jackie had purchased on a whim. "I guess we will," he said with a sad smile. "Though I haven't got much to offer without a TARDIS or a sonic screwdriver or the whole of time and space at my fingertips, have I?"
Rose flopped down on the couch next to him. "Nope," she said cheerfully, taking a bite of stale biscuit. "You've got nothing to offer at all."
The Doctor chuckled. "Thanks. It's always good to have my ego taken down a notch. Don't want it to get over-inflated or anything. Dangerous, that."
"What, have Time Lords got egos? Aren't they above such nonsense?" Rose mocked, poking him in the arm. "Next you're going to tell me that Time Lords have got other silly things too, like jealousy and appetites and libidos and stuff."
He almost seemed to blush at that, or maybe Rose just imagined it. "I'm only half Time Lord now," he pointed out, stealing a biscuit out of Rose's hands. "I'm going to have to deal with all the silly human things."
"Yep," Rose said, popping the 'p' like she'd heard him do so many times, and that earned her another smile. "Looks like we both sort of got the bum end of the deal."
"Yeah?"
"Well, I mean, we're both stuck without the TARDIS, but at least I'm used to it by now," Rose told him. "But you had to give up the TARDIS, your regenerations, your glamorously independent lifestyle, a universe where everyone knew who you were. And all you got out of it was one heart and a cheap life with a shop girl."
The Doctor shook his head. "It's hardly cheap, and you're hardly just a shop girl."
Rose started to say something, and bit her lip. She wondered. She propped up her elbow on the top of the couch and rested her head in it, her body turned toward his. She watched him watching her face as she moved, and once again, she was very aware of how little she was wearing, very aware of her damp hair on her neck and the soft towel pressed against her chest and the scratchy sofa fabric under her thighs. She kept her legs clamped close together. No reason to give him more of a show than she already had done.
Not that she necessarily disliked the idea of giving him such a show. If he was up for it. She cringed at the unintentional play on words and immediately shut that train of thought down lest it completely derail.
Once she was comfortable, or as comfortable as she could be, anyway, she said quietly, "You're going to get sick of this. Being in one place all the time. Not being able to travel."
He positioned himself so that his body language mirrored hers. "No," he said, hooded eyes blinking lazily.
Rose laughed. "That's all you've got to say? 'No'?"
"Yes."
"God, you're impossible."
A small smirk. "Yes."
"But won't it drive you mad? Just the sheer..." Rose searched for the right word, "...domestic-ness of it all?"
"You're worth it," he said simply.
Rose knew she was blushing now. She could feel it in her cheeks and just behind her ears. She could only hope it wasn't as red as it felt. She swallowed. Loudly.
She wasn't accustomed to the Doctor being like this. It was going to take some getting used to.
"I mean, I'm not saying I want to set up house and choose drapes and participate in block barbeques and have a fence and pets and all that," the Doctor rushed, pulling on one ear nervously. "The idea of housework and having a job and living a linear timeline and dying someday does all drive me a bit batty. But you're not some consolation prize, Rose. I meant it when I said I chose you. Really, if I'd truly wanted to stay, do you think anyone could have stopped me?"
"No," Rose said. She played with a snarl of thread on the couch cushion in front of her. The Doctor was close enough that she could reach out and grab his free hand if she wanted, but she rolled the thread between her fingernails instead, giving herself some distance, playing for time, trying to ignore the almost electric charge that had started simmering between them.
"We've got zeppelins," she blurted out abruptly.
When the Doctor's expression changed to one of confusion, she quickly added, "And, you know, jets and bullet-trains and monorails and stuff. It's not the TARDIS, but it's pretty fast. And they go all over. We can still travel, is what I'm saying. Maybe not through time, but space, anyway. And Torchwood and UNIT would probably love to have you—"
"Oh, is there a UNIT here?" the Doctor perked up.
"—and to be honest the idea of keeping house and a mortgage and a stupid normal human life doesn't really appeal to me all that much, either," Rose admitted. She shrugged. "What can I say? You ruined me."
The Doctor beamed at her. "Normally I'd say that's a rather dreadful thing, but I don't know, I sort of like it. I've ruined you, both for other men and a normal human life."
"Well, you know what they say, once you've gone Time Lord, you don't go back," Rose giggled.
"But I'm not a consolation prize either. Right?" the Doctor asked, suddenly serious, his dark eyes younger and more vulnerable than Rose had ever seen them.
She reached out for his hand, curled her fingers around his. She squeezed his fingers reassuringly, and a pleasant, warm thrill shot through her at the contact. She was still surprised at how much warmer he was than his Time Lord counterpart.
She didn't mind the difference.
"No," she told him. "You're not."
He squeezed her fingers back.
Rose chewed her lower lip. "I do really miss the TARDIS, though."
The Doctor let out a heavy exhale. "Oh, yes," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Although actually, the rift detector I just built makes a very comparable whooshing noise—"
"Well, you just sort of jumped right in it, didn't you?" a voice announced from the doorway. Rose turned to see Jackie and Tony standing there, door and mouths all agape. At the sight of Rose's towel-clad body, Jackie promptly slapped her hand over Tony's eyes. "For shame!" she hissed.
"Mum!" Rose protested, and the Doctor immediately pulled away and sprang up from the couch. "This must be Tony!" he said with a bright smile, extending his hand for Tony to shake. "Hullo, I'm the Doctor—"
"The Doctor!" Tony said in a daze, almost reverent, finally meeting the man about whom he'd heard so many stories. He reached out as well.
"Oh, no you don't," Jackie said, situating herself in front of her son. "Not until you've had a wash of those hands. I don't know where they've been, all over my daughter's naked body, I'd wager—"
"Oh my god," Rose groaned. "Mum, I just got out of the shower."
Jackie held up her hands. "I don't want to know the details, darling. I just thought he'd give you a little more time before he'd pounce, is all!"
"I just got out of the shower alone," Rose said through gritted teeth. She cinched the towel more tightly around her chest. "What are you doing here, anyway?"
"Didn't you get my text?"
Rose tried to think of the last time she'd even seen her mobile, and realized that it was probably still in the Torchwood hospital room, or maybe bagged as some sort of evidence by now. "No," she said honestly.
"We're going shopping!" Tony announced, his face bright and shining. "I'm getting a new toy," he confided in the Doctor. "Are you getting a new toy?"
"I think he's already got enough toys," Jackie said drily, looking her daughter up and down. Rose shuddered to think how her mum would shriek if she actually looked at the floor and noticed the mess down there. "Rose, if he's going to be staying here, he needs things. You know, a proper change of clothes and an ID card and whatever he puts in his hair and—"
"Does 'he' get a say in any of this?" the Doctor interrupted cheekily.
"—and under-things and deodorant and all that rubbish," Jackie finished with a huff.
"Deodorant?" the Doctor asked, wrinkling his nose. "Why? Can't I just keep using Rose's?"
"What? Did you really use mine?" Rose asked.
The Doctor averted his gaze from hers, suddenly finding his sock-clad feet very interesting. "No," he lied. "And I didn't use your toothbrush, either," he mumbled.
Rose rolled her eyes. "Yeah, we're definitely gonna do some shopping," she said on her way out of the room.
"This is exactly the sort of 'domestic' I didn't want," the Doctor called after her.
"Welcome to life off the TARDIS!" Rose called back.
She heard Tony digging through the electronic items on the floor. "What is all this stuff?" he asked the Doctor.
"And what is all this stuff?" she heard her mother shriek after him, finally noticing the mess in front of her.
Rose grinned to herself as she closed her bedroom door on the sounds of the Doctor and her mum arguing. She grabbed a bra out of the laundry pile and slipped it on and pulled a vest over her head. She hopped into a pair of snug-fitting trousers and ran her fingers through her drying hair and she was fairly certain she heard the Doctor heatedly telling Jackie, "...but it makes tea!" and Jackie shooting back, "That's what a tea kettle is for!"
Rose couldn't remember the last time she'd felt so content.