All the windows in Rose's room, from the small one on the door to the two average sized ones on the wall on the outer side of the complex, were made of bulletproof glass. After her first, and so far only, therapy session, Rose had been classified as calm enough to be moved out of the "quiet room." Rose had been proud of herself for not attacking the doctor who'd ordered her put in a place named after a type of time out for 6 year olds.

Although she was alone in this room, too, at least Rose was allowed to have most of her clothes back. They still wouldn't let her have her shoes or TARDIS key back, because she could hang herself with the chain or laces.

Though they didn't know it, the nurses had made two tactical errors when they gave her back her clothes. One, they had let her learn where they kept her effects; and two, they didn't know she had a secret pocket.

After being stuck in prison for three days because the Doctor had been in a healing trance after being stabbed in the lung, Rose had insisted on being taught to pick a lock. So far she could pick almost any mechanical lock, and the Doctor had been teaching her how to get past electrical locks. Under the Doctor's tutelage, every prison had become a learning opportunity. And, after being imprisoned for nearly a week because the jailers had been smart enough to take the Doctor's jacket, Rose had insisted again, this time on having a way to keep her lock-picking equipment with her. While most prisons would pat her down, even turn out her pockets, none of them would expect the tiny fifth pocket of her jeans to be bigger on the inside. And this was actually the first place that had her stripped of her trousers. There were surprisingly few jails in the universe that forced its prisoners to wear nothing but their underwear, if that.

There were times when this disappointed Rose.

Rose walked over to the door and examined the lock. It was set up like the doors in her high school. One side never locked for easy access. The other only ever unlocked with a key. Since patients' belongings were searched, they didn't think that anybody would be able to pick the lock.

She could see why the door was designed this way: if the nurses, techs, or doctors needed to get in quickly because a patient had hurt themselves, they didn't have time to fumble with keys. However, they needed patients to not go wandering around, so the inside must stay locked. Still, what an embarrassment if someone on staff managed to get themselves locked in, so the keyhole was on Rose's side of the glass.

A cursory examination told Rose she could pick the lock in less than two minutes. Still, best not to stage a jail break for a few hours, yet. Let them relax in the night, thinking she was asleep.

To that end, Rose lay on the bed and closed her eyes. To keep herself alert, she shifted frequently, not letting herself grow too comfortable. And if she tossed and turned more than most, with any luck it would be assumed to be the disturbed sleep of the mentally disturbed.

*

"As you know," Dr. Shote was saying. "We have to be particularly vigilant in this part of the world due to the mercury mines." The Doctor hmmed non-committally. "We have regular sessions teaching people what signs to look for in each other." The Doctor chose not to comment on the fact that this trained people how to hide their own insanity.

Shote was leading the Doctor down a nondescript corridor. The solid wooden doors that lined each side were spaced exactly the same distance from each other. It all seemed to loom aggressively. The Doctor briefly wondered how paranoid schizophrenics managed in this building.

"This evening," Shote continued. "We got a message from the bartender that one of his patrons was openly displaying symptoms of distress."

"But despite your seminars," the Doctor interrupted, frustrated. "He isn't a psychologist. He can't make a definitive diagnosis."

"Of course not." Dr. Shote agreed smoothly. "We sent out one of the doctors to evaluate the situation. He quickly reported back that this girl was indeed in need of help. So we sent in a retrieval team."

"Retrieval team?" The Doctor felt his hand clench into a fist involuntarily. He stuffed it into his pocket and continued his ruse. "What is the protocol of that?"

"Our primary concern is that neither the patient, our doctors, nor any bystanders come to harm. To that end, our first action is to chemically restrain the patient from a distance."

"Tranquilizer dart," the Doctor translated blandly, fury beginning to narrow his vision. Everything Dr. Shote said he'd already been told by Jack, but to hear this toadying little man so calmly speak of assaulting his Rose was enough to eat at his self control.

"Indeed," the psychiatrist continued, ignorant of the battle taking place in the Doctor. "Also, since her companion might object to our taking her we temporarily immobilized him. The force field will have worn off by now. After that, it was a simple matter of extraction."

"And the patient? Has she woken up, yet?" the Doctor asked, vowing to himself that if sedatives from this time period had hurt her, this building would be destroyed in literally biblical proportions. He would personally assure that no brick stood upon another.

"She has woken and is talking. Her name, as I've said is Rose Tyler. She's being very cooperative. Ah, here she is, now, but it seems that she is resting. She's quite a pretty little thing." The fawning little man, ignorant of the danger that statement had put him in, gestured grandly to a door that was identical to every other door he'd seen so far.

But even before he looked in on her restless frame, the Doctor knew that Shote was right. He could smell her perfume, taste her adrenaline, and feel her mind behind that door. Her mind was a whirling jumble even more unknowable than it usually was, and as enticing as it always was. The Doctor wanted nothing more than to sink into her mind, to twine his timeline around hers so that no time-sensing creature could ever doubt who she belonged to. The urge flared within him, but just as quickly he suppressed it and focused on the matter at hand.

Despite himself, a curiosity sprung up in the Doctor. "What's the diagnosis?" He asked after being led away from Rose's door and into a lavishly furnished office he assumed belonged to Shote.

"Oh, something I haven't seen in years." Shote responded with enthusiasm, sitting himself behind the desk that looked to have been made of something resembling mahogany. "She has acute xenonymphosis."

The Doctor blinked and slightly shook his head. For the first time, everything seemed to have stopped. He couldn't feel the flow of time, or hear anything but his own heartbeat, and whatever he was looking at failed to register.

The Doctor licked his suddenly dry lips and swallowed thickly. Praying to every deity he'd ever heard of that he wasn't misunderstanding, the Doctor asked. "What's the primary symptom of that disorder?"

"Oh, exactly what it sounds like. Rose wants to have sex with an alien."

Before the Doctor's neurons could remember how to fire, an alarm sounded.

"Shit!" Dr. Shote muttered, glancing nervously at the man he believed came from the capital.

"What's that?" the Doctor asked.

"A patient has escaped."

*

Rose got back to the TARDIS much sooner than she'd expected. One of the two techs on duty had told the other as he passed Rose's room that he was going to grab dinner. The other said she'd join him in the break room in 5 minutes. She'd kept her eyes closed to continue feigning sleep.

While she waited, a sense of peace, of belonging stole over her that was completely inappropriate given the situation. It was the sort of feeling she usually got whenever she entered the TARDIS, or when wrapped in the Doctor's arms in a far too chaste hug. If she didn't know better she would've thought the Doctor was standing outside her door, or that the TARDIS had materialized around her. She kept her eyes closed despite the strong desire to see if she could tell where the warmth that tickled her mind had come from. It quickly faded.

After she was sure that ten minutes had passed, Rose knew that her TARDIS key was unguarded.

It was the work of a moment to jimmy open the lock on her door. Having escaped from more places than Houdini, Rose was confident as she hurried down the hall to the room where her shoes and key were still held.

After dropping the key's chain around her neck, its warm familiar weight between her breasts a welcome beacon home, Rose pulled her shoes on, hopping in her haste. She glanced up and praised whoever invented the emergency exit signs. A quick examination of the adjoining hallway directed her to a door saying not to open except in emergency as an alarm will sound. She flippantly decided that a misdemeanor being added to her record on this rock would hardly matter as she never intended to come back.

Longing to get back to the TARDIS's welcoming hum, Jack's rakish smile, and the Doctor's warm hug and manic grin, Rose pushed the door open. But before her hand touched the door, an alarm sounded. Ignoring it, Rose opened the emergency exit. A different siren began to blare and lights began to flash.

Not heeding either alarm, or maybe heeding both, Rose ran into the night, dodging into alleyways and darkened streets.

*

Almost as soon as the first siren sounded, another flared up.

"Well, what's that one, then?" the Doctor demanded. His temper was as short as it had ever been, since these stupid apes had stolen his Rose and lost her in one night. Plus, his head was still reeling from Rose's indirect admissions, but he hated to acknowledge that such base considerations held sway over him.

"Fire alarm," Dr. Shote said reluctantly. "It's likely that whoever escaped used an emergency exit to leave."

The Doctor almost laughed aloud. At least Rose was out of this place. "Tell ya what," he told the miserable psychiatrist. "I'm gonna go to my hotel, say I got stuck in a traffic jam and didn't get in 'til after midnight. You get this place quieted down, and I'll see you in the morning. Pretend I didn't see all this."

Relief suffused Shote's face, and the Doctor turned on his heel sharply, no longer having any use for the man. He kept his pace in check as he left the building, but as soon as he felt a breeze on his face, the Doctor broke into a run, making a beeline for the TARDIS.

Boots beat woodenly on the pavement. The odd puddle splashed resentfully as he ran heedlessly through it. Street lights were few in an attempt to encourage the citizenry to stay inside at night. But the Doctor was blind to the dark, deaf to the rhythmic pounding and immune to the cold water that splashed his leg. All that mattered was getting to his Rose.

Rose had proven how clever she was from the day he'd met her. He knew she'd be heading back to the TARDIS, the only safe place on this miserable rock.

He heard a brief patter of feet up ahead and the slam of a wooden door. A brief chide hummed in his mind, though it wasn't directed at him. To know that the TARDIS deemed Rose healthy enough to be reprimanded for something as trivial as slamming doors did a lot to ease the Doctor's mind. Had he been in a more playful mood, the Doctor likely would have pretended to be cross with Rose for not treating his ship better just to make her squirm, but he couldn't play with her, not now.

Slamming the door himself, the Doctor ran up the ramp. Rose turned from the console in surprise, relief, and what the Doctor now knew was more than mere affection. He had been hoping for so long now that Rose felt for him a small portion of the heart crushing love that he had been concealing from her, that he had convinced himself that he only saw what he was looking for.

He swept her up in a hug, running his hands across her back and down her sides to make sure she was unharmed.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"What for?" Rose asked, pulling back to search his face.

"I got you locked up, again."

"I did that all on my own, thanks."

"No. They thought you were crazy," the Doctor said mournfully. Rose began to look worried, probably wondering how much he knew. "The only crazy thing about you, Rose Tyler, is that you didn't realize that I spend a large portion of every minute of every day wishing that I was brave enough to make a move, to tell you how I worship every inch of you, or to simply give in and finally learn what your lips taste like."

For a long time, Rose stood motionless, staring at him. Her breathing was quick and shallow, her heart pounded against his chest. Finally, she licked her lips, a movement that he followed closely. "God, if this is some sort of drug-coma dream, I never want to wake up," she told him fervently, before pulling him down to devour his lips.