2. The Most Mundane of Things

He half-turns in his seat to see her over his shoulder, mostly just so she'll stop that slow approach, creeping up like he's something unknown. Some kind of predator. That sudden shadow, that flash of want, even just to reach out and touch her is so much harder to ignore now in this new version of himself, the Doctor version ten-point-one. Or it could be the alcohol. Maybe it's the alcohol.

He raises his eyes to the skylights after a moment, ignoring her exhausted shoulder-hunch and the bare arms that she hugs into her body. Ignoring how she pulls her bottom lip into her mouth in his periphery. He can't think of a single thing to say to make anything right or easier or even bearable.

"Imagine," he says to the ceiling. "Imagine for a minute that you're you. Not so hard, you do it every day, that's familiar, isn't it? Day after day, or days in between, you know, and then suddenly something happens. Whatever it is, something big. Something takes you out of your head, puts you somewhere new." He gestures blindly with his free hand, keeping his eyes on the vault of the high ceiling, the wooden beams and glass skylights, pulling out syllables through his bottom teeth. Outside, an unhurried kind of rain is running down the domed glass, merging at passive junctions, falling into the dark. "And now as there was once only one of you, there are now two. Imagine that you are you and now, suddenly, you are not the same you you were. The you you used to be, the default you, is across the room, and you're something else to everyone but yourself. Nothing is different for you, not your mind, not how you see things, think things, say things, remember things. Nothing about who you are is different, except maybe something inside you is different, something you can't feel without thinking about it."

She's come up beside him by now, listening while he averts his eyes and prattles, maybe drunkenly, maybe not.

"Can you imagine that, Rose? Imagine suddenly there is a competition for the title of the Rose Tyler, and you're not winning." He takes a drink rather than look at her. He remembers just how hard it hit her when Doctor version nine-point-zero erupted in marigold light and cooled off a taller, thinner man with better hair, a chirpy gob and a wicked need to put his hands on her just in the way he knew he shouldn't. He'd had to charm her then, prove he was still essentially the same, even if completely different. He wants to tell her he's far more the same now than he was then. He wants to say he's gone through regenerations where more than changed in his physiology than the differences between the two of him now, except maybe it isn't true. He's often joked that he might end up with two heads or eye stalks or gills or six hands, but the truth is (was) that he was all but ensured the same basic design every time, if nothing else, and he would never have lost a heart in the deal. At least he thinks so. It's not something he wants to test. Not that he can, now.

She's looking at him now the same way she did then. Like she wants to understand, but something in her can't. And maybe she will, but then maybe she won't.

She had, however, kissed him. Kissed him so he'd nearly forgotten to breathe, forgot to think, electrified by a profound jolt of euphoria and probably that should embarrass him, that he can be so easily derailed by such a simple, physical act. Maybe he can blame this human-ish body on his part for that, but for her part he can't blame impulse when he'd exploited her most raw vulnerability he could have at the time. Though even if he hadn't, the other still would have left. If perhaps a bit more gracefully instead of turning tail and running back to the TARDIS like the heartsick selfish coward he is (they are). Not that he can blame himself. If the tables were turned, he wouldn't have been able to stand it any better than the other: letting him have everything he wants while he...

Yes, well. In any case, she hasn't answered him. He takes another drink and shrugs miserably.

"I suppose it must be difficult to accept, even after you've seen it. If you've got a bucket of water and you pour it into a different bucket, it's still the same water, isn't it? Even if the new bucket's only got one heart."

She blinks, pulls out the bar stool beside his to sit quietly. "You don't have to explain yourself to me. You didn't..."

"I did. That's the point. Whichever me did it, still me." He turns the glass in the light before dropping his gaze and dragging it along the countertop, over a damp cardboard coaster and the rings of condensation where he's forgotten to use it.

"If it was like that, with the bucket, there wouldn't still be the same bucket full of water somewhere else, yeah? And if it's split in two, there's only half the water left."

"But it's still water, is what I meant. What was inside it didn't change. And this bucket's got all his water, thanks." He's botching this explanation, he can tell. After all, he's not explaining regeneration this time, not again.

There's no metaphor, single or otherwise, to explain a biological metacrisis the right way to a human who can't quite be convinced that two of something doesn't make the second any different from the first, at least until the moment they became two. It's a very human sentiment, after all, that there can only be one valid instance of anything without the other being in some way less.

"Starfish." He says suddenly.

She raises her arms up, hands locked on her own shoulders. He makes the mistake of looking up at her; her eyes are bloodshot, rimmed with red. Exactly what he doesn't want to see. "Starfish?"

"Yes. A starfish fragments. An arm breaks off-new starfish grows from the broken arm. Their DNA replicates and replaces what's missing, echinoderm asexual propagation. New starfish, then. Now you have two starfish, made out of the same. Same DNA, exact same everything. Just two. One's not less the same starfish just because it was physically there first."

"And everything one starfish knows, the other knows?" There is just the smallest hint of amusement when she prompts him like that.

"Well. Given the intelligence of starfish it's hard to say. A man is the sum of his memories, and I admit my knowledge on the emotional sentience of starfish could be sorely lacking, but!-"

Rose holds up her hands, fingers spread into the air, protesting the attempted tangent. He frowns a bit, leans with his elbows on the bar top, catches a hand on the back of his neck.

"It's not such a foreign concept. Starfish. Plant clippings. Things growing out of other things without being exactly new or even different. On a sentient intelligence level, maybe. My people were a bit unique when it comes to identity and propagation." He finishes the drink and, at her resulting silence, pours another. He probably shouldn't, he knows it.

"So," she says, her voice so carefully flat there's nothing to give her away. "You're a starfish. You're a bucket of water." She shakes her head. "Same mind in a new body. Like a cyberman."

"Not," he says pointedly, "like a Cyberman." His eyebrow lifts without his permission and he casts an almost-glare over, not really meaning to. Now that he's looking he's not sure she wasn't joking a bit.

"And all that, it's supposed to make me...what, exactly? Feel better? Stop being angry?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know. I wish you weren't angry."

"I wish you didn't feel like a stranger."

Ouch. Without his consent, a corner of his mouth lifts up, one side of a curtain opening in a smile that doesn't feel good at all, it feels more like prodding an open sore. "You've never felt that way before?"

"Suppose I have." She picks at the countertop. "He said. He said the price of saving everything was you."

"Yep. That was nice of me." He takes a drink, clicks his tongue. "Everything would be just lovely if I hadn't popped up and bloody saved everything when it was going to hell. Bet I didn't think that one through when I said it. Brilliant. Talk too much, that's my problem."

"Tell us a new one, Doctor." She reaches over, fingers grasping, takes the glass from his hand and drinks, which, to his way of thinking, is a rather intimate gesture to make to someone she's just acknowledged as a stranger. She makes that screwed up alcohol face and swallows noisily, looking down into the drink for a long moment before continuing. "He said...you're dangerous."

"Not any more dangerous than he is, if you're married to that particular pronoun. If I hadn't been there to do it, he would have done, whether he likes the idea or not. Or I would have had to, however you look at it, it had to be one of us. If I'd thought I was unstable and dangerous I'd have never left you here with me."

"And I suppose..." she trails off, one hand clasped against the back of her neck, eyes drifting closed in a long, exhausted blink. "The two of you discussed all this?"

"Not a word. It's not as if it's a terribly exciting prospect, a conversation with yourself. Not much to say you don't already know. In all your jumping with that dimension cannon, I bet that's one thing you never ran across. Billions of parallel worlds, Rose. Stacked up on each other, membranes of potentiality. Billions of versions of Rose, even more of me if you've moved around in time. Did you come face to face with another Rose Tyler?"

After a moment she shakes her head, and he reaches, takes the glass back from her fingers. They're warm, they leave negative prints of fog ghosted around where her fingertips have been. What's left of the ice rattles.

"Even if you had, at least you'd know she was different. From another world, different experiences; it's a different life and different memories that make a different person."

"But just a different body doesn't, you mean."

"Should it? Aren't you different now than you were at Canary Wharf? Even from how you were yesterday, this morning when you woke up?" What he doesn't say is that looking at her now feels more and more like looking in an old mirror, seeing a kind of living reflection of himself from before his last regeneration cycle.

("That's me," the Other had said. "Before we met." Of course he'd been talking to Rose, but now he's wondering he hadn't been addressing them both.)

"In my experience, days don't often make a habit of ending much or anything like I expect-but this," he nods a little convulsively, raises his eyes up, surveying, tangenting away. "This is, I'm certain, not what you were expecting. I couldn't have dreamed it up if I tried. Hotel Bar. Norway. And Rose Tyler, angry at me." He shakes his head a little with his eyes focused on the bar top, eyebrows raised, lips above the rim of the glass, pointedly poised over the faint lip print she left. Maybe he does it on purpose, to remind her. She can't have forgotten she kissed him. She's even thinking about it now, he knows it, because as much as they're talking about him being him and a her that isn't her and starfish and buckets, really, what they're talking about is that she kissed him, chose him whether she knew quite what she was choosing or not, and how that's going to work moving forward if she's regretting that.

Really, if he's honest, this is a lot of the reason why he'd never done it. Fear of something he couldn't take back. He'd never be able to unkiss her if he'd let himself step forward and close that distance that had always screamed to be closed every moment he spent in her proximity. He'd never be able to unconfess anything he let tumble out of his mouth that she may not want to hear, or worse, that she did want to hear. He'd been too possessive of the happiness they'd had-that he'd had. Wanting more, risking an alteration to any aspect of it, or just rushing the arrival of that moment when they had to go their separate ways...just the thought of any of it had made him skittish as a rabbit from the start. He'd gone a long time without a companion, before Rose. Spent a long time rethinking the entire idea of them, their function, their importance, the rules of what they were and what they weren't. Then he'd spent every day she'd been with him reminding himself of those things, puzzled that they'd made so much since before he'd met her, and every day since he'd lost her punishing himself for adhering to imaginary rules he'd made up himself and respecting the taboos of a society of ghosts.

"I'm not angry at you."

"You are. I didn't say goodbye, or I left you here with me, or I planned this without telling you, no matter what you want to call it, it's me that did what's been making you sit up awake in that hotel room while I'm sitting down here...drinking." He rolls that word out slowly, tasting it for the rare delicacy it is.

"But you're not," she begins, then furrows her brow again, shakes her head slowly before starting over, sounding tired. "...why are you drinking?"

Another shrug, since he guesses he's not completely sure why. "Seemed like the right thing, an ending to a day like this one. We'll call it an experiment, see how much it takes."

"And," she says softly, "how much does it take, then?"

He takes the bottle in hand and eyes it, thinks back, lifts his eyebrows and enunciates carefully. "A lot."

When he looks up, it's less that she's smiling than that she's just not scowling; not the picture of resigned melancholy she's been. "Rose," he tells her, keeping his eyes away from her because its easier. "It's still me. Honestly, I-if I wasn't, I'd say. You know I'd say."

"I know." She says it so quietly, he wouldn't hear it if everything else wasn't so turned-down. "I know you are. Something takes you out of your head, and you end up somewhere new-someone new, but not. You're used to changing, but I-Doctor-I don't know what to feel. I feel awful that I'm not happier and worse that I don't feel...worse." She shakes her head again, lifts her eyebrows. "I dunno."

He slides the drink toward her, swallows the words that jump into his mouth, him wanting to fill the silence because its so much more comfortable than listening to her breathe and palpably ache in the spaces in between.

Sighing, she wilts against the bar top, her elbows first, then her head, arms folding over it like closing flower petals, her eyes to the starless ceiling. In the half-dark of the great room, she fights tears not so well that he can't see them catching what little light they can. "And I travelled so far. For so long. Looking for...and it just." With a sudden movement, her head is buried against her forearms. "I worked so hard, is all, and-and I have to remember that I had more reasons for it than just...thinking I could go back."

Rose slowly lifts her head and then the glass, looks into it before drinking. She makes the face again after she swallows, staring down into the liquid with her lips slack. "And what's worse is I haven't even asked if you're alright."

His automatic false response is interrupted by a swell of abject misery she seems to notice in his expression. He doesn't reply, since it's not like she'd actually asked.

"Maybe it's the least of your worries, and, I don't know if it helps," she says softly, "but I'm glad you did it."

He inherits the tumbler, only holding it before seeking out her face against his better judgment. Instinct pushes him to make light of it, derail her with a subject change. Instead, all he can produce is a watery smile.

"It's not something to be glad about. But it needed doing. Always does. And if I'm not wrong, it'll need doing again. Every time. Every time it needs doing again because they make it out, and every time I end up...like this." He can feel her eyes on him, watching his thumb and forefinger absently pinch the lobe of his ear briefly, worrying it before letting go. "Because a mass electrowave system power override switch is really just a big trigger." He draws out the last word, letting it drop low in his throat and under his breath. He doesn't look at her.

"Yes," he says, after a long pause, nothing but breath and the almost subliminal sound of rain on glass. "I suppose I am dangerous. And I suppose that hasn't changed from body to body, even if other things have. Coffee instead of tea. Suits, leather coats, cricket whites, scarves, hats, new eyes, new teeth. New hand. But every time I've died, changed, everything that's happened to me has come along with that light you saw. Because that's me, Rose. More than any of this, that's me. I'm that light, and these bodies, they're just the same as suits, leather coats, scarves, hats, a change of clothes. You can store me in a receptacle-a fob watch, in a storage Matrix. Personalities are just biochemical balances in organic tissue, regulation of gene expression, all amino acids and neutotransmitters, secretins, gastrins, somatostatins, and all of it fired by energy. That's what went into that jar when I didn't want to change-energy, Rose. Mine. When I didn't want to change because of how much I couldn't stand for you to look at me again the way you're looking at me right now." His voice rises so suddenly at the end she nearly jumps and he rakes a hand over his face and through his hair like it's a handful of weeds he means to rip out, rubs at one eye with an index finger.

"Even though this time you're not looking at someone different and trying to find something familiar. Instead, you're looking at something familiar and trying to find something different." He drains the glass, stares into it. "Life is funny."

"I'm not laughing," she whispers, and he's got her attention now, there's no doubt of it. Perhaps it's his loose tongue, and maybe that's the alcohol and maybe it's stress and the long, long day-week-year-life he's having or maybe it's that bit of Donna coming through just a hair. Or maybe he's lived nine-hundred years not saying anything he really wants to say. "And is this you, then, snapping at me, Doctor? Or are you having another difficult regeneration?"

He almost laughs at the prospect of difficult regeneration, the exhaustion that happens when one rebuilds themselves cell by cell into someone new; remembers waking up in strange pajamas in a strange bed, a room smelling of plastic Christmas garland, of cinnamon and wood smoke and with an apple in his dressing gown.

"Chromosome architecture stabilized within minutes of the energy siphon. Six billion base pairs, protein strands and RNA products locked up all proper. The hand had the whole diploid genome map in the somatic DNA, but no catalyst." He stretches out his hand as an exhibit, as though it illustrates anything other than this is the only piece of him she may be willing to accept as genuine. "Then Donna touched it. The energy activated, but since she touched it, skin cells, hair follicles, a bit of fingernail, whatever it was, just a touch of human enough that the existing tissue and human DNA create a metacrisis-a recombination, if you prefer-and the energy just rebuilds everything that's missing with the materials and blueprints it's got. And it's my hand, so the rest of me is what's missing, isn't it?" His tongue is on a rampage and he doesn't dare look at her. "So I wake up as though nothing's happened, feels like seconds after I siphoned off the excess energy, but no. Takes a minute to put it all together. All of it. Everything that's happened, even since the moment I transmitted that goodbye to you, maybe long before, all of it led us here. Timelines so twisted up even I couldn't untangle it until we were at the end of the knot. And here we are, at its end. So if you're right finished telling me I'm not me, I've got some drinking to do to pass the time in my retirement."

"I think you've had enough, Doctor."

He nods, a painful smirk sneaking up on him. This isn't going the way he'd pictured. If he'd even pictured anything.

"Why didn't...you ever say it before?"

"Say what?"

"On the beach. What you said to me on the beach."

She's not repeating it, being vague and ambiguous in a way that isn't Rose, and all at once there's a stone where his stomach had once been. Funny, that- how his tongue shuts right up, when it wants. He has to unstick it from his jaw, just to squeeze out his reply, the answer that burns all the way up coming out. "Because the universe would never let me keep you."

He watches her recoil a millimeter, leaning away on her stool to face the emptiness of the low lit hotel lobby, the front desk far across the high polished pine floors, a stone fireplace the size of a grand mausoleum, blazing with gas-fed flames the color of cobalt and copper. She's a profile, sharp shadow and angles, vector curves and fractals of golden hair against firelight. He wants to touch her with a frightful urgency he should have learned to suppress half a millennium ago, and maybe he had and it's simply that Rose Tyler has been the exception to everything he's ever known about himself.

"And because, I just...didn't know how-no-didn't know the right way to say it."

"Fairly simple, I thought."

"Is it? Languages are limited to expression of concepts its engineering culture understands. And love..." He breathes it out almost absently, but still she turns, at attention. "It seems so small, doesn't it? Encompasses too many things. It's not exactly unique to the English language, this watering down of everything until it means almost nothing. People profess to love the most mundane of things. Television programs, a football team. Chocolate. A house. Songs. It's just not the right word for what...what I wanted to say. It's still not. It can't-not properly-but, it never can. Even words like wonder and awe pale in comparison to how they feel. What they really mean."

Like forever, a tiny word for a concept the human brain cannot grasp. Uncountable other temporal ideas no Earth language has a word to remotely describe (not even regeneration is quite the correct word and neither is metacrisis for that matter) but every one of them has got a word for forever. And love. Love, an even smaller word that's supposed to describe the most ineffable sensation of concurrent misery and joy he's ever experienced. Synonyms aside, that humans can boil these things down to such small words they accept without question, that seem like enough, it makes him in equal parts irritated and envious.

As though love could ever be the most mundane of things. As though any part of a life shared, lived being wanted instead of needed could ever be boiled down into words that could ever be enough.

She's smiling now, despite herself, he's certain of it, but still he can't look. He's focused on his hands, gripped around the glass, erasing her fingerprints. Yes, it's a funny old life that he's here at all, split off and settled here in this foreign corner of existence with one chance at everything he may have ever wanted but been afraid to acknowledge, he seems to be intent on mucking up thoroughly.

"Well, how would you say it, then? If anybody knows the right word for it, it's you."

"There aren't any. There aren't enough words in the English language. There aren't enough words, Rose Tyler, in any language."

"Not even your own?"

His own language. Fifteen different self-referencing pronouns, over a hundred tenses and fifty different grammatical phrases, all irregular verbs, and no positive word equivalent for love that isn't of a familial variety.

Languages are limited to the concepts its culture understands. But the body, it learns. On a long enough timeline, change is the only constant.

He laughs, and to his ears, it sounds bitter. "Most especially my own."

She's silent now, there's just the babble of the rain and empty space, of breath and the sense of passing time. It's a few minutes before she stands and circles around to where his knees perch off the bar stool, bent tight and cobalt blue in his suit trousers and she nudges between them. She stands between his knees and catches at his face, tilting it up toward hers and she's a masterpiece of human symmetry, looking down at him with red-rimmed bourbon colored eyes and lowered eyelashes, looking at him while the other is far enough away he can nearly ignore for a moment the feeling that he'll always be there at the back of his vast mind if he concentrates on it, and wonders blandly if it is a two-way kind of mirror. A perverse part of him hopes it is.

"I travelled so far," she repeats. "I worked so hard, saw such...I watched as terrible things happened, things I couldn't prevent. Couldn't change. Things...worlds where there weren't even any pieces to help pick up after everything was done. All of it, to find the...and..." Her mouth works silently, he watches it try to make the words; words that will be as immense and heavy as others are worthlessly small. Twisted in the stomach, his single heart thumps hard, blood pressure spiking with every drumbeat and he watches the shivering glisten of tears return and spill over when she blinks, raises her eyebrows with conflicting emotions battling for room in the same expression before it settles inevitably on sorrow.

She doesn't continue. There's no moment to react before she's pulled him toward her, his cheek to her neck with her arms folded around his shoulders, standing while he sits, slumped forward against her with his arms folded tight around her waist; he'd wrap both around her twice if they just could be long enough to do it. She smells fresh of citrusy hotel soap and a spicy mouthwash smell from the bourbon, and he's never been so grateful or so kind of shell-shocked; his mind heavy and saturated like an overfilled sponge. So completely uncertain of anything in the most terrifying and exhilarating way.

Perhaps this, more than anything, is what it is to be human. Barreling headfirst into the fog, certain of nothing, not even the next sunrise, next breath. He could be killed by bacteria, toxic gas, asteroids, cholesterol, poison, just one little bullet. The fact that humans even leave their houses, much less throw themselves into the situations they do, knowing their own fragility; it's nothing short of extraordinary.

(He knows it's science, biology, psychology, this evolved positivity bias is essential for survival, but as Time Lords had a near endless supply of time at their disposal, they'd had no need of it, and he is very aware of the realities of his new mortality. It seems a terrible irony that the race entrusted by the cosmos to harbor and govern temporal reality had so much time at their disposal that they'd come not to value it at all.)

It's been less than a week since he was nearly murdered by a group of frenzied ferry passengers. Ten approximate linear Earth days since the Library, since Vashta Nerada and data ghosts and hearing his name spoken in his ear by a stranger. Twenty-one days, nineteen hours, thirty-two minutes since he drank arsenic in 1926 and, coincidentally, the last time he slept more than a few minutes in the jump seat or face down on his lab bench.

She's pulling on his hand, stepping back, saying words he can't focus on because they were prefaced with "Come up to bed" and his attention had blinked out. She's towing him toward the stairs, they're leaving the bottle behind and he is feeling in his trouser pocket for that key card Pete left him with his imagination and the alcohol conspiring against him viciously.

He's exhausted enough, entranced by present company and the champagne fizz his blood has turned into after almost a fifth of bourbon and a long embrace, that he hasn't noticed the soft giggle of the rain has stopped. Hasn't noticed the chill in the air, or the slow drift of a heavy wet snow falling against the skylights. Hasn't noticed that-Norway or not-it's July.