CALLUSES


"It hurts, but that's all it does. You build calluses on your feet to endure the road. You build calluses on your mind to endure the pain. There's only one way to do that. You have to get out there and run." ~ David Goggins


I.


Her hand slips out of his the way the TARDIS slipped out of this universe; only more quietly, maybe.

Rose walks towards the sea, away from him and her mother both. She walks until the sand sinks beneath her feet, the pressure caused by her weight drawing salt water from the ground.

She stares at the small puddles that surround her feet, listless and numb.

When a hand comes to rest on her back, she doesn't even tense. "Got us a taxi," her mum says. "Pete's working on getting us back, said it's gonna take some time, though. I figured we could get into town, get something to eat?"

She gives a non-committal shrug of her shoulders.

"Do you want to tell him or should I?"

She is grateful for her mother's pragmatism. She's probably just as confused as Rose is about what's happened, if not more so, but instead of prodding and nudging, she's obviously doing her best to remain neutral.

There's a man in a blue suit standing somewhere behind her, a man wearing a face she loves, who whispered all the right words, yet she doesn't know what to do.

She doesn't know much of anything.

"I'll go," Rose says simply, moving her feet at last. Her first steps are heavy, the feeling caused by more than wet sand having sucked in her shoes.

She turns, finding him at once, hands in his pockets, eyes closed; he hasn't moved at all.

At first glance, he looks like he could be meditating, patiently waiting for something to happen, and that observation alone causes her insides to twist in unease. The Doctor she knows is a contradiction of moods, demeanours and emotions, but standing still is not something he does, generally speaking.

Rose's unease only worsens as she approaches him. There's too much tension in his body, as if his every muscle were locked into place. From the set line of his jaw, she knows he's clenching his teeth. Another crease between his closed eyes only add to her suspicions.

"You all right?" She asks, quietly.

He still doesn't move, at first. When he makes to nod his head a little, his frown deepens. "I'm…fine."

He's too still, though.

She comes closer, almost against her will, hearing how shallow his breathing is, clearly controlled, yet shallow. "You're in pain." It's not a question.

He swallows, and that gesture alone causes his body to flinch. "Headache," he mutters.

Rose doesn't want to worry; she would rather stay numb, but she can't help it. "Is it…was that supposed to happen?"

Again, he gives a minute nod of his head. "It's not unexpected, given the circumstances." A pause, and then: "I'm sorry."

"What for?"

"This is not going to be pleasant."

He's bending over with a groan of pain, then, and she instinctively steps forward to keep him from stumbling, bracing his middle with an arm. Next instant, he's vomiting bile at their feet.

Trapped in her odd, detached state of mind, Rose notes the absence of food from his sick. Not that there would be any.

This body is only a few hours old.

"I'm not comfortable leaving you here all on your own," Jackie says, pacing the small hotel room, arms crossed.

Her features are strained, having experienced more in the past twelve hours than Rose ever wanted her to experience.

"I won't be alone," Rose reminds her quietly, and her mum's eyes briefly dart to the bed and the man lying in it. Rose doesn't follow her gaze.

When their eyes meet again, her mother tilts her head, sceptical and concerned. "I wouldn't exactly call him good company, now would I," She notes, unnecessarily. "What if…" She lowers her voice. "What if he snuffs it?"

A past version of Rose would have been offended by the comment. She would have told her mother off for being so crude, and for even suggesting he wouldn't make it. But that version of her is long gone, hardened by the past few years.

The Rose Tyler who's been left stranded on that beach (again) less than two hours ago doesn't feel much of anything.

She's clever enough to put two and two together, though. She guesses that what's happening to him is a direct consequence from being away from either the TARDIS, his other self, or even Donna. Maybe all three. He's in too much pain to be able to talk, at the moment, not to mention unconscious; he's used the last of his energy to look somewhat human when they entered the inn, earlier. A very drunk human, maybe.

Human nonetheless.

Rose doesn't know if this is temporary, the way it was when he first regenerated in front of her, or if this 'metacrisis' thing of his has gone wrong.

She doesn't know, and the other two people who would have been able to answer her questions fled this universe without as much as a goodbye.

"Maybe he'll make it, maybe he won't," Rose tells her mum, in a voice so detached she's not surprised by the uneasy look Jackie gives her. "All I can do is wait it out. There's no point in you staying here, it won't help. Pete and Tony are waiting for you. Just…go home."

She says the last two words wearily, as if the past few weeks she's spent jumping across time and dimensions are finally catching up to her; all that work she'd done to go home herself.

And for what?

Jackie knows better than to argue. A few years ago, she might still have been able to sway her daughter's mind, but not anymore. She hugs Rose tightly instead, at a loss for any comforting word. After asking her to call her every few hours, she leaves the room, off to get that taxi that will take her to the nearest airport.

The enormity of everything that has happened does not hit Rose until late that night.

He has not shown any sign of consciousness since they've helped him into bed, only moaning in pain every now and again. He goes back and forth between searing heat and cold sweat, whenever his fever breaks. Rose is kneeling on the mattress, pressing yet another cool compress upon the flushed skin of his face, when the feeling of déjà-vu hits her.

For the briefest of moment, she's not in this dark and unfamiliar hotel room anymore, but in her mother's bedroom, inside her childhood's home, tending to a man she isn't sure she knows anymore.

But he'd woken up, eventually.

He'd saved the planet and taken her hand in his, pointing at the stars and the universe beyond, at that vast infinity left for them to explore.

Together.

Rose doesn't quite know how she went from the bed to the small bathroom, but there she is. Curled up into herself with her back against the door, head buried into her knees as her body shakes with the force of her sorrow, the sounds of her distress more or less muffled.

Not that it matters, anyway; he cannot hear her.

Not from a universe away.

The pain, he decides, is highly inconvenient. Not to mention bloody excruciating.

When he begins to emerge from what he assumes was his most recent regenerative coma, it's gone down a great deal, as opposed to the agony he was in before he lost consciousness. He feels it in every inch of him, though, from his epidermis to the marrow of his bones, concentrating particularly on every single muscle in his body. Breathing alone is ridiculously painful. Surely one is not supposed to be that aware of their diaphragm contracting and relaxing.

In that unsubstantial moment that follows his foggy awakening, the Doctor becomes aware of several things.

He's only got one heart, and his respiratory bypass system is gone.

He panics a little, as anyone would upon realising that the physiology they've happily lived with for over nine hundred years is suddenly completely mucked up. His single, pitiable heart has the nerves to speed up dramatically at the realisation, hammering even more when he notices that he can't control his pulse anymore either.

What?! is what he would be asking, if he was properly awake – which apparently, he isn't yet.

There's something else, pushing at the corner of his mind…more than one something else, that much he can tell, but he's somewhat reluctant to let these other realisations unfold, as he's aware on some level that they will only make things worse. There is…loss, there.

A big, gaping hole of something missing, something that's been torn from him, and it's not his right heart.

I've only got one heart. I'm part human. Specifically, the aging part. I'll grow old and never regenerate.

The words – his words, echo in his head, and he takes a sharp, painful breath, as another wave of understanding hits him.

Rose.

This is the thought that finally succeeds in properly jolting his body awake, his eyes opening; it doesn't take long for him to find her. There's only one armchair in whatever room they're in, and she's curled up in it, asleep.

Even as he stares and stares and stares, he knows it's rude to stare.

Creep, another voice chastises him, and it's his voice, yet not really. He carries on staring, and the voice – which is ginger because voices can have hair, raises both its hands in defeat and mild disgust.

How could he not stare, though?

His resurfacing memories are slowly informing him that he's seen her recently, as in hours ago recently, but it still feels like he's not yet been given a chance to look at her properly, to take her in. To take it all in.

Why don't you ask her yourself?

He's aching with a different kind of ache now, wishing she'd open her eyes, and give him one of these smiles he's been so deprived off when they were separated, one of these smiles that can light up everything around her, from a dark room to a bitter Time Lord's hearts.

Well. Heart.

Right. That's going to be a problem.

His muddled mind is functional enough to inform him that whatever it was that altered his genetic makeup so drastically and torn a piece from him – again, not just his heart, it will also greatly diminish his chances of seeing Rose smile in the immediate future.

He forces his brain to work through the fog dimming his most recent memories; he'd assumed he regenerated again, as all the signs pointed to it – very painful coma included, but he's not so sure now. Missing heart and primitive breathing system aside, this body feels familiar.

He vaguely remembers getting shot…he was running, running to Rose…his beautiful Rose, only metres from him after being a universe away for years. Something's obviously gone wrong during the regeneration process. It's always changed his entire body, never his physiology.

Rose's hands on him, her face stricken with fear and pain.

Don't die. Oh, my God. Don't die.

He'd started to regenerate and then…

He sits bolt upright, a strangled, pained sound escaping his throat, caused in part by his sore body, but mostly, it comes from the sudden awareness of what has been taken from him.

His TARDIS.

Gone.

Not just 'floating somewhere in the Time Vortex' gone or 'stolen by a psychopathic Time Lord' gone.

'Taken back to another universe' GONE.

Unfortunately, he's already all too familiar with the deep ache that comes with being trapped on one side of the Void while something (someone) precious to him is trapped on the other side of it. Except that what was a gaping hole between his hearts after Canary Wharf is also a gaping hole in his very mind, now, where his connection to his beloved ship had been for centuries.

And then, there's Donna.

"No no no no no…" he mutters, curling inward as everything rushes back, both hands clenching fistfuls of his damp hair.

The fact that he cannot quite remember what happened after getting shot by that Dalek makes sense, now, considering he'd hadn't been quite alive at the time. This body, this pitifully weak, sore, one-hearted, time-sense-free body of his took its first breath hours later, after Donna's DNA kickstarted a bit of an impromptu metacrisis. And it'd been almost fine for a while, hadn't it?

Dandy, even. Molto bene!

He should have realised what would happen once he and Donna were separated by no less than an entire Void between universes. As long as they'd been in each other's proximity, within the TARDIS's energy field, they'd kept each other…sane.

This…this had been no post-regeneration coma. This had been his metabolism trying to cope with the sudden severed links from the two entities that had brought him to life, while having a Time Lord's mind and centuries of memories cramped into a feeble human brain. From the way his thoughts are still scattering while his very grey matter throbs in pain, he's still adjusting; but he'll make it.

Donna will not.

"Hey..."

He only realises that he's been muttering as well as rocking slightly back and forth when the quiet sound of her voice causes him to stop.

He slowly uncoils, suddenly more mindful and aware of his own aching body, letting go of his hair, before straightening up a little. He brings a shaky hand to his face, using the back of it to wipe what appears to be a trail of saliva from his chin.

"Sorry," he whispers loudly, keeping his eyes closed. "Everything's a bit…" Painful? Overwhelming? Terrifying? "…foggy."

There is silence then, and it's a horrible kind of silence; heavy and oppressing and never-ending. Rose doesn't say that it's okay or all right or fine. She doesn't say anything at all, which says quite a lot.

He begins to fidget, unable to bear the thought of being still in all that quietness. He doesn't realise he's brought his right hand to the left side of his chest until he feels his pulse beneath his palm, matching the rapid thump thump within his skull.

Part Time Lord, part human.

When he opens his eyes at last, he notes that he's actually moved a lot more than he intended, now sitting at the edge of the bed, both legs over its side, his toes tapping the floor at twice the rhythm of his heart, as if he could bring back the missing beats.

Right across from him, Rose stares and does not smile.

He stares back and doesn't smile either.

"Now first thing's first, and be honest," he says, the familiar words causing her to tense ever so slightly in her armchair. "How bad do I smell?"

Judging by her frown and the small shake of her head, this is not the question she expected. Which, obviously, is what he was aiming for.

"My olfactory system is not what it used to be in this half-human body, while I can definitely tell my sudoriferous glands have been particularly active and productive," he explains. "Judging by the general dampness of my clothes, or the fact that my hair isn't remotely dry, I've done that a lot. The sweating, I mean. I've never worn deodorant before, what's the point when your body doesn't naturally smell when it cools itself down, right? So really, just be frank. How bad is it?"

The look on Rose's face is nothing new, a mix of wariness, exasperation, and plain confusion.

Maybe she expected their first 'real' conversation not to be about his stench, which is fair enough. Yet again, if she knows him at all – and he suspects she knows him a great deal more than she realises, she shouldn't be surprised by the fact that he's deflecting.

He's half-human. He's lost his TARDIS, and somewhere in the other universe, his other self undoubtedly went and erased all traces of him(self) from Donna's memories.

Of course he wants to know how bad he smells.

"It's…" she begins, her nose scrunching up a little. "Dunno," she breathes out. "Nothing I haven't smelled on a bloke before, I guess."

Now that's slightly insulting. Although he guesses he is 'a bloke' now.

Nevertheless, carrying on with the deflecting, he lowers his head towards his own armpit and gives it a good sniff, quickly moving his face away with a disgusted grimace. "Bloody hell," he chokes, Donna's voice echoing within his mind. "Nope, this won't do at all."

He's off the bed, then, nothing short of bouncing off it, making a straight line for what he assumes is the bathroom, aware that he's more or less running away. No more blood and fire and anger, now.

Just plain cowardice.

When he reaches the door and turns back towards Rose, she's not looking at him anymore either; she's sunk back into her seat, face turned away, her eyes lost and unfocused. Even in the dim light, he notes how pale she is, how strained her features are.

He wants to apologise, although he's not quite sure what for. He's a mess, she's a mess, and there is so much they need to talk about, so much they need to decide.

The Doctor steps into the bathroom and closes the door instead.