Rose ruffled through her bag, pulling out every single item that could possibly be inside – a handful of coins, old tissues, and a single glove. Every item imaginable except for the one she was looking for. "John!" Rose called, abandoning the pointless search through her bag and moving on to inspect the inside of the junk drawer, "Have you seen my car keys?" Her husband didn't answer. With a sigh, Rose pushed shut the drawer with her hip, her arms full of the items she had removed from her bag. She paused at the table at the stair's base to dump the contents held back into her bag, then trotted up the stairs. "Honey? I said 'ave you seen my car keys?"
She pocked her blonde head into their bedroom, finding it empty. Same with the entertainment room, the bathroom, the guest room. John was nowhere to be found. Rose frowned. Where was he? Probably in his office, grading papers.
When the Doctor had first dropped them off in the alternate universe, John had been at a loss as to what to do with himself. At first, after taking the name John Smith, he had worked with Pete at his company, helping to clean up the mess the Cybermen had left in their wake and working to get the world back on track without the earpods. John had quickly grown bored of that as, with all of the Doctor's memories, a desk job was like wearing chains. He and Rose had traveled around in the other universe - Egypt, Greece, New York. A small pittance compared to the entire universe. However, when they had been forced to return to the Doctor's reality, Rose had insisted on settling down. She had traveled around enough in the TARDIS, now she was married to the man of her dreams and she wanted to live her life with him like a normal couple… despite the fact that her husband was a duplicate of an alien man. John had taken a lot of convincing, it went against all he was to stop running, but his dedication to Rose had overpowered everything else. He had taken a job at a local high-school, teaching history. He refused to admit, but Rose knew that he quite enjoyed it.
Rose went back down to the second floor, making her way to John's office. She paused and knocked on the door, "Honey are you 'right? Have you seen my car keys? I'm going down to the shop." She knocked again, concern filling her heart. Ignoring her wasn't like him. "Honey?" She opened the door, "You 'right?" Her heart stopped as she saw the mess inside. The room looked like a tornado had whipped around inside. The desk was toppled, half-graded papers covering the ground. The window was shattered, glass everywhere. The bookshelves had been searched, books on the ground and pages ripped out. Already she knew something awful had happened. Then she saw it; drops of blood soaked into the carpet. "Oh my god," Rose whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks.
She stumbled down the stairs, back to the entryway, grabbing her bag off the table and emptying it out. She grabbed her phone. A warning light was blinking at the top of the screen indicating, to her great frustration and distress, that the battery was running down. She ignored it flipping through her contacts looking for a single number. Her hands were shaking with adrenaline and fear, so it took her two attempts to hit 'Call'.
The words 'Calling TARDIS' came up on the screen, and Rose put the phone to her ear, collapsing to the ground. "Doctor!" she said as soon as the phone was answered, "I need your help."
"Who is this?" a male voice asked on the other end. "How did you get this number?"
"Doctor?" Rose said, her voice quivering, "It's Rose. I need your 'elp."
From the other side of the line she heard the male voice conversing with an urgent female one. The phone was handed off and the woman's voice spoke into the phone. "Hello, this is Dr River Song. I'm going to guess that you were trying to call a vastly different Doctor. Am I right?"
River Song sat on her bed, in her cell, her blue diary open on her lap. She stared down fondly at a picture of herself and the Doctor standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower, all of Paris strewn out below them. 1929. Paris. A picnic under the stars. The perfect date. River wondered if the Doctor would remember it when the next met or if it would be a distant memory or a memory yet to be made.
A single guard was watching her, as it was the night shift. She had asked for privacy at night, for obvious reasons, but her captors had refused. They merely conceded to lower the number of guards from three to one, even though one guard or even three were hardly a match for River Song.
The phone on the wall across from her cell began to ring. River sat up, interested and slightly worried, placing her book on the bed beside her. The last time she had gotten a phone call, events had escalated to the effect of the Doctor erasing himself from existence.
The guard picked up the phone, "Who is this?" He asked. "How did you get this number?"
"That's probably not for you," River warned him, getting up from her bed and standing by the bars. Her guards never seemed to get the memo that she actually was allowed to receive phone calls. She reached out for the phone, "Really, give it to me."
The guard hesitated and then sighed. "Don't get me fired," he grunted, handing over the phone.
"I'll try not to," River purred. "Hello," she said to the caller, "this is Dr River Song. I'm going to guess that you were trying to call a vastly different Doctor. Am I right?"
"Yeah," the woman on the phone said, "is the Doctor there? Can you give him the phone? Please, it's 'portant." Her voice was ruined with both fear and a hideous cockney accent.
"Believe me," River said, "If the Doctor was here, I wouldn't give him time to take a phone call. When are you?"
"M'sorry?"
"When are you calling from? The TARDIS has a habit of redirecting call here. I once got a call from Winston Churchill that was meant for the Doctor. He was a flirt, and for once I use that word describing someone other than my husband. Now, when are you calling from? I might be able to pass on a message."
"It's 2012."
"Oh," River said, "by any chance did any little black cubes fall from the sky recently?"
"How did you…? Um, yeah. Few months ago. John won't let me keep 'em in the house, reckons their dangerous."
"Well, I can tell you exactly where the Doctor is, my mother told me all about it."
Rose hurriedly scribbled down the address River had given her. It wasn't far, just the other side of London.
"Good luck," River said, the phone lying on the table next to Rose's pulled-apart bag, set on loud-speaker. "And before you go. Did I hear you tell my guard that your name is Rose? You wouldn't happen to be Rose Tyler? Although, I'm not sure if that's possible."
"I was," Rose said, putting her coin purse back in her bag, "Now I'm Rose Smith."