a/n: This chapter deals with the aftermath of the events in Dreaming in Color and Wide Awake, however enough is explained in the chapter that I don't believe you have to read those in order to understand this. Warning: This chapter contains a small amount of swearing.

I'd like to thank Bittie752 and scifigeekgirl for letting me bounce ideas off of them while I've been writing, and Bittie for reading over this chapter. As always, however, I've made a number of changes to it since she read it so all errors are mine.

Please note: A small amount of the dialogue in this chapter was taken from the episode The Waters of Mars.

Chapter One—Aftermath

Previously in Wide Awake:

"Goodbye, Doctor," I whispered before I could stop myself.

"What… what did you say?" he asked.

I could have kicked myself.

"Said g'night," I lied. "What 'cha think I said?"

"Just that," he whispered. "Goodnight, Rose."

I relaxed in his embrace, lying there just feeling him hold me and listening to him breathe. I was tired, but there was no way I could sleep, no way I would let myself miss one more second of his time here.

Eventually I felt him gently kiss my hair and heard him whisper, "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. It did need saying. I should have said it long ago. And if it's my last chance to say it, Rose Tyler, I love you."

And then he was gone.

I felt it the instant he left, the instant my Doctor returned, in the way he held me, squeezing me gently.

The tears that had repeatedly threatened began to fall and this time I let them.

We didn't talk about it, the fact that he had let the other Doctor use his body, the fact that they had tried to keep it from me, the fact that I knew, had known all along. What was there to say? Instead, my Doctor turned me towards him and held me as I sobbed.

~oOo~

Five hours later…

In an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Cardiff, the Doctor tossed and turned in his sleep, dream images flashing through his mind.

Dressed in a bright orange-red space suit, the TARDIS behind him, he looked over the edge of a crater at the white domes of a sprawling space base.

Suddenly he was standing in a shining white lab of some type. A middle-aged woman with blonde hair stood in front of him. "State your name, rank, and intention."

"The Doctor. Doctor. Fun," he answered.

For some reason, the images made him anxious. Even in his dream state, he could tell there was something wrong. His breathing quickened as the dream images sped up.

A robot. "Gadget gadget."

The face of a young woman. Distorted. Damaged.

The words "Bowie Base One" echoing around him.

Beside him Rose was so deeply asleep that she didn't notice the slight tremors of the bed or the sound of the Doctor beginning to mutter in a combination of Gallifreyan and English.

Still immersed in his dream, he murmured, "I've got to go."

Water. Dripping.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Water pouring.

"Bowie Base One."

As the dream turned into a nightmare, he became more and more agitated.

The blonde woman. Adelaide.

"Your death is a fixed point."

"Help me."

"I can't," he quietly moaned.

An explosion.

The small movements he had been making suddenly turned to thrashing as the nightmarish sounds and images raced at breakneck speed.

The red earth of Mars.

The deep orange of the spacesuit.

The white of the space base.

"Bowie Base One."

"I've got to go."

Water pouring from a face so altered it scarcely looked human.

"Bowie Base One."

Fire surrounding him. Searing heat almost burning his face.

"The laws of Time are mine. They will obey me."

The sound of an explosion. The blue of the TARDIS against the falling snow.

"Last of the Time Lords. The winner. Time Lord Victorious."

The sound of a gunshot. An Ood standing under a streetlamp.

And then the tolling of the Cloister Bell.

"No!" he shouted and sat up, lungs gasping for air, heart pounding, eyes wide with fright. "Ahhh!" Pain shot up from the fingertips of his fully Time Lord hand through his arm and shoulder to lodge itself in his chest. His face screwed up in pain, he took deep breaths through clenched teeth with his left hand clutching the opposite shoulder as he willed his heart to slow and the pain to go away.

With the sound of his voice and the shaking of the bed, Rose was instantly awake.

"What? What is it?" she cried as she sat up. She reached over to grab his hand. It felt as if it were on fire.

The horrifying images in his mind slowly receded, but the deep bonging of the Cloister bell still rang in his ears. He turned towards her, his eyes haunted.

"Oh, Rose," he said, "he's done something bad."

~oOo~

The next morning, Rose glanced at the Doctor across the kitchen table. His expression was unreadable. In the hour since they've been up, he hadn't said a single word; she'd held the entire conversation by herself. Other than to tell her about his nightmare about Mars, he hadn't really spoken to her since yesterday morning. When for some reason he had allowed the other Doctor to take over his body for the day.

The question in her mind was how much he really knew about what had happened yesterday. And last night.

At the time she believed he knew, was even there, and if he hadn't exactly approved, he at least accepted it. Particularly because neither Doctor had told her the Time Lord was using his body.

Surely he had to know what would happen.

But she had figured it out, and it had happened anyway.

She hadn't thought about it as cheating on him—after all, they were the same man in her mind—but maybe he did.

Biting her lower lip nervously, Rose set her still half-full mug of coffee down on the table.

"I've got to head out," she said. She jerked her head at the door. It was just a tiny movement, barely a movement at all, but it emphasized that she was going, and going soon.

The Doctor nodded and set down his own mug. His was full; she didn't remember him even taking a sip of the strong, black brew he usually loved. And the fry up she had made had gone untouched on his plate.

To be fair, she hadn't had much of an appetite either.

She stood up from the kitchen table, and he stood as well.

"I'll be back tonight," she told him. "And don't worry about dinner. I'll bring home takeaway."

He nodded again, not quite meeting her eyes.

An awkward silence fell between them. Again.

"Do you want anything special?" she asked eventually, and he shook his head.

"Well, okay then," she said. "If you change your mind, just let me know. And if you need me, ring my mobile. I expect to be in my office all day, but you never know with this job." She hesitated for a moment, then stood on her tiptoes and gave him a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth before heading out of the room.

She grabbed her blue leather jacket off the coat rack and her keys out of the wide, ceramic bowl set on a table in the entry on her way out the door. Once in her car, she put her key in the ignition but didn't start the engine. How could everything with him have gone to shite so quickly?

But she knew how. And she knew why.

And it was her fault.

The only question was whether she could salvage it or not.

~oOo~

The Doctor heard the front door close quietly as Rose left the house, and he picked up his coffee and headed back upstairs to shower and dress. Torchwood didn't really need him, not at the moment at any rate, and he was spending the week working on the TARDIS.

It was just as well. He wasn't sure Rose wanted him around anymore. Her going to work without him at least gave her a bit of a break away from him.

To think she traveled across universes to get back to him, only for this…

He set his mug of coffee, still untasted and now probably cold, down on the chest of drawers in the bedroom.

He had screwed up. He had allowed him to borrow his body, which was bad enough, but he hadn't told her it was happening. He had lied to her. And she was putting on a valiant front, trying to pretend that nothing had happened, nothing had changed.

But everything had changed.

In his mind he returned to last night, when he had regained control of his body only to find her crying. When he had allowed his other self to use his body for the day, it was with the understanding the other Doctor wouldn't hurt her. But he obviously had.

And since he had agreed to all of this, it was his fault as well.

He had ruined everything.

The only real question in his mind was whether he could salvage their relationship, or whether she'd kick him out: out of the house, and out of her life.

All of a sudden it occurred to him that he hadn't heard her car pull away. He quickly crossed to the window and looked down. Rose's bright red Mini Cooper was still in the drive. She was still here.

He should go down and talk to her. Apologize. Beg her to forgive him. Promise anything.

But then the car started, and she pulled away.

Symbolic of their relationship?

The thought terrified him.

The Doctor took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He had had people leave him before.

But no one like Rose.

Because there had never been anyone like Rose for him before.

He shoved thoughts of her leaving him out of his mind.

He picked up his mug and finally took a sip. As he had suspected it would be, it was cold. He grabbed his sonic screwdriver from his pocket—setting 172—and sonicked it to reheat it. He took a sip—and spat it back out into the cup when he burned his mouth.

Should have been setting 171, he told himself.

After a quick shower and a shave, he got dressed in his blue pinstriped suit, his go-to suit when he was feeling off, and headed down the stairs and outside, grabbing an anorak off a hook by the back door on the way. He was grateful for the coat, he really was; this part human body of his wasn't able to regulate body temperature nearly as efficiently as his Time Lord one did, and he felt the cold much more keenly than he used to. Gift from Donna, he supposed, as he remembered how cold she had been on the Ood homeworld.

But as warm as the anorak was, and it was warm, he missed his long brown coat. Not only had it been warm, it had had style and it had done that flappy thing when he was running. Inwardly he sighed. The Time Lord Doctor still had it, and the TARDIS.

On the other hand he had gotten Rose, and that was by far the better part of the deal.

Assuming he still had Rose.

No, can't think about that right now.

Badly in need of a distraction, he strode down the path through the woods that led to his TARDIS. He didn't really need to work on her today, but tinkering with the old TARDIS had been his method for distracting himself for centuries, and, boy, did he need a distraction today.

He arrived at the clearing and stopped for a moment just to look at her. He smiled proudly. She had grown so much from the small chunk of coral that his other self had given him. As soon as the little TARDIS coral had grown to be the size of a pillar, a bit more than 2 meters in height, they had placed her there. Already far bigger on the inside, on the outside she currently looked like an English oak tree, approximately the same height as the other trees nearby. Her leaves were even beginning to change color. Once he managed to build a chameleon circuit for her, though, she wouldn't have to look like a tree. She'd be able to look like anything, anything at all.

Just as he was about to move forward, the scene in front of him wavered, and instead of standing in front of a tall oak in the woods, he was walking towards a blue box on an alien landscape. And then, as quickly as it had appeared, the vision was gone and he was back in the woods.

Well, isn't that wizard, he thought, pinching the bridge of his nose in irritation.

He had been increasingly plagued with intense dreams over the past few months, dreams he had begun to realize were not dreams at all but actually telepathic contact with the full Time Lord him. Recently, however, it had begun to happen occasionally even while he was awake. And then there had been yesterday…

No, he couldn't think about the worst mistake he had made during this incarnation. That's why he was out here, after all, as a distraction so he wouldn't have to think of the one thing he had done that could have ruined any chance of happiness with Rose.

The one thing, the only thing he wanted in this life, and he had already screwed it up.

~oOo~

Late that afternoon, Rose sat at her desk in her office in the Hub, staring vacantly at the chaos in front of her, music drifting up from Autopsy where Owen Harper was organizing his new equipment that had recently drifted up from the Rift. He had taken to listening to some new group she had never heard of—he had called them LLM—and he continually blared their new album whenever he was working downstairs. Normally she was pleased that when her door closed she could hardly hear it, but now she considered opening the door. She was still trying not to think about her problems with the Doctor, and she could use any distraction she could get. She had spent the day not talking with anyone, mostly hiding in her office, using the excuse that she was trying to tackle the business aspects of her job. Owen had said she was brooding, but she didn't want to put a label on what she was feeling, and certainly not that one.

Or the one that hit even closer to home: guilt.

No, she could think about that later she told herself for about the hundredth time. Over the years, she had become an expert at compartmentalizing her feelings. She had had to. Her devastation over losing the Doctor had been so overwhelming that if she hadn't been able to put it aside occasionally, she would have never been able to accomplish anything. At first the time could be only measured in seconds before she had a rush of despair. Over time seconds became minutes and eventually hours could go by before her emotions overtook her. But every night she allowed herself a few minutes to remember him, to remember the love and happiness they had had together and the grief and loneliness she felt by being apart from him.

And now those skills were being put to the test again. And were failing.

She had things to do, she had told herself that morning. And top on the list of what she had to do was de-junk her office.

Even though she had tried to work on reducing the clutter in her office today, there were still mounds of stuff—even after months she still wasn't entirely sure of what—shoved up against the walls of the room and her desk was still covered with piles of paperwork. When she had taken the job as the head of Torchwood Three, she had expected there would be problems. Problems with weevils terrorizing Cardiff during the dark of the moon. Problems with hostile aliens attempting to take over the planet. Problems with alien tech that had come up through the rift and had managed to find its way into the hands of the general public. Problems with Owen being an arse. In short, all the problems she had always encountered while working at Torchwood.

But she hadn't expected that the hardest, most frustrating problems she would encounter would have to do with paperwork.

Rose brushed a lock of her blonde hair out of her eyes and studied the mess on her desk. The stacks to her right were bills that had yet to be paid, the stack to her left were bills that had been paid. In front of her there were incident reports from the police, expense reports from the staff, memos from headquarters, intelligence reports from UNIT… and somehow, despite this world being capable of developing a trans-dimensional transport hopper and a dimension cannon, paperwork was still largely done on paper.

After realizing she had been staring at the same piece of paper for at least a minute, she leaned back in her chair and noticed the calendar on the wall. It was ridiculous to have a paper one anymore; after all, calendars were on every computer, every phone, every piece of electronics invented. But this one featured photos of tourist sites in and around Cardiff. Gwen had loved the photos—they truly were gorgeous—plus the calendar had come out of the Tourist Office that served as the entrance to the Hub, so it had been free. So she had stuck it on the wall and there it had stayed.

The calendar was currently sporting a shot of the Bay at sunset: the sky orange, the water gold, and the clouds a vivid scarlet. In the distance you could make out the silhouette of a transoceanic zeppelin.

And it said May.

She hadn't even been working here in May.

With a long-suffering sigh, she got up and crossed the room to the calendar, dodging random pieces of alien equipment on her way. To reach it she had to lean over one of the piles, old magazines that might have been here from when Mickey was in charge. Or possibly even Jake.

She flipped the calendar to the correct month—passing photos of a pastoral landscape and a Roman ruin that was located nearby—to find November.

Oh, was it really November already?

She sighed. Not only was it November, but November was almost over. It had been almost five months since the Crucible. Five months since the meta-crisis that created this version of the Doctor. Five months since being left on Bad Wolf Bay.

Five months since having the Doctor back in her life.

The time had flown by. In less than five months, far less actually, she had fallen in love with him again, began a real relationship with him, moved in with him, and bought a house with him.

Yet they had so perfectly slipped into all of that, in some ways it felt like their separation had never happened, like they had always been together and always would be. And she had had no doubt they would be.

But now…

She couldn't have fucked up worse if she had tried.

Fucked up. How… appropriate. She'd laugh if it didn't make her so sick to her stomach.

She hung the calendar back on the wall, now proclaiming the correct date, and turned back to the disaster that was her office. She would have loved for Ianto to do it. He'd have the mess cleaned up in hours, not days. The only reason he hadn't done it so far was he hadn't been asked nicely, and she hadn't wanted to ask him to do something that was really her responsibility. She began to walk back to her desk, to that portion of the mess that was actually hers, and accidentally kicked over a pile of who knows what in the process. It spilled all over the floor, revealing that buried underneath books on baby names and infant care were some magazines featuring scantily clad women on the covers.

That pile had definitely been Mickey's.

She began to pick some of them up to throw into the bin when a knock on the door interrupted her. She turned to see Toshiko in the doorway.

"Are you sure you and the Doctor don't want to come with?" Toshiko asked cajolingly. "Gwen's bringing Anwen."

Rose was sorely tempted. Gwen, Rhys, Tosh, Owen, and Ianto were going out to dinner that evening, and she knew Ianto was even bringing his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Lisa. Rose and the Doctor had been invited as well, and for a moment she seriously considered going. Maybe being around other people would allow them to get back to a little normalcy. But no. She knew what they really needed was some time alone to try and work out their problems, not just gloss over them.

"I'd love to," Rose replied. "But we can't. Not tonight." She glanced at her watch. "Oops, I'm late. Gotta go. Guess the bills are gonna have to wait after all."

"Well, if you two change your minds, we'll be at that new pizza place by the train station," Toshiko told her. "Can't remember what it's called." She pulled out her mobile.

"Don't bother," Rose said before the other woman could look it up. "If we decide to come and I can't find it, I'll ring you."

Rose headed out and Toshiko slowly followed her down the stairs, still searching for the name on her phone.

"There it is. Found it, Rose." she said, not noticing Rose had already left. "It's called Lupo Cattivo Pizzeria." She looked up. "Rose?"

~oOo~

Despite her best intentions to talk to him, dinner was just as strained as breakfast had been. She had brought home a curry, and they sat at the table picking at their food, making small talk, and avoiding looking at each other.

Well, at least as he was talking. Sort of.

Afterwards they watched telly—Rose would have been hard pressed to say what—and then went to bed.

Where he hesitantly gave her a kiss on the cheek. For a moment he looked like he wanted to say something, but then just said goodnight and rolled over, facing away from her.

It was the first time since they had moved in together that they hadn't had sex before bed. Even when intercourse wasn't an option, they always found other things they could do.

For a few minutes, she lay on her side, facing him, wondering if she dared to spoon him. She longed to touch him, but for the first time since the beach—the first time possibly ever, in fact—she wasn't even sure if he'd be open to a hug.

Oh, what had she done?

Her heart breaking, she rolled over, facing away from him, and tried to sleep.

~oOo~

The Doctor lay there silently, waiting for more than an hour before he heard Rose's even breathing indicating she had finally fallen asleep. He had longed to roll over and pull her into his arms; only his guilty conscience was preventing him from doing so. That, and the fact that he didn't know if he really should. Undoubtedly she was upset with him, undoubtedly they needed to talk about what he had done, what he hadn't done, what he should have done… But the thought of talking, really talking, rather than just his gob rambling, made him more than a bit queasy. It was why his previous regeneration—well, two regenerations back now he supposed, if he wanted to consider the meta-crisis in the count—despised domestics.

And was there anything more domestic than this?

The thought of domestics still occasionally made him want to run. Not from Rose, of course, but from the rest.

Particularly since the rest included the fact that domestics required him to face his part in what he and the other Doctor had done, and the guilt he had over it.

Blimey, he was rubbish at domestics, and he didn't do guilt well either.

But if he was going to face Rose, if she was ever going to forgive him they'd have to talk.

Tomorrow, he told himself firmly. Tomorrow they could talk.

Maybe.

Well, it was now obvious he wasn't going to sleep tonight. Seeking another distraction from his thoughts, he quietly got out of bed, got dressed, and headed out of the house.