Author's Note: Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. This chapter takes place directly after the events of Chapter 1, before the events of Chapter 2 (though as far as the Eleventh Doctor is concerned, this is all just now rattling in his head after Chapter 2). The Doctor Duplicate and Rose have just reconciled. Reading that chapter first might help, whereas the rest can (more or less) stand alone though they're all linked in their ways. Remaining chapters will tighten the links between each.

She never fully remembered their first kiss.

Every once in a while after he regenerated, he caught her staring at his lips as if she almost remembered and held his breath until he saw her dismiss it. She still struggled in remembering anything of her time as the Bad Wolf, her mind and his telepathy having locked it away from her for their safety. If he'd stayed in that form, if he hadn't regenerated, he wasn't sure he would have been able to keep it from her. He'd felt her entire being surge towards him, when he drew the energy of the Time Vortex out of her, and he knew what it had done for him.

It made him a new man.

His ninth regeneration had been born out of anger and fear and war and pain and battle, and it showed in every line of his lean, angular frame. He carried the time war with him like a physical weight on his shoulders, pressing him down to the earth.

Rose made him want to dance again.

In this form, he'd been besotted with her from the start. He'd never been vain before–oh, he'd had his share of strange fashions, but he'd never been concerned with how other people saw him to the extent that he was when she looked at him. If his last form had been born to withstand the war and look the part, this one was born to suit her.

This form seemed designed to hold her hand, to run with her, for smiles and laughter and long looks and swooping hugs. Again, she had their second first kiss stolen from her, the invasion in her mind leaving them both with the memory, but allowing him an easy way to escape, to be the coward he was. They might dance, but they'd never dance. He wouldn't do that to her, not when he couldn't even gather the courage enough to say the words.

He had given her that, on the shore at Bad Wolf Bay, a murmur of love into her ear that out of pity he'd kept quieted in front of his other half. They had years of memories of regret, haunted by the irony of the Time Lord running out of time, chased by memories of her smile and her laughter wherever he went, and he knew that he was being given a gift. His one human heart, diminished capabilities, and Rose Tyler.

He was filled with such hope, until the TARDIS began its dematerialization.

Quite a long time ago, Sarah Jane had brought a stack of DVDs onto the TARDIS, thrilled with the novelty of them compared to the technology of her time. Movies that were brand new to her, still in theaters or in production when she'd first started travelling with him, pressed onto discs with crisp images, able to flip around scenes and containing special features from actors aged decades between her time and their release in the medium. He would watch them indulgently, or catch bits and pieces as he bustled about the TARDIS with his ridiculous scarf practically sweeping the floor behind him.

He remembered a young Dustin Hoffman sitting next to a woman in a white wedding gown in the back of a bus, making their escape towards their happy futures with laughter and smiles, running hand in hand from everything they left behind. And stepping up to Rose Tyler on that beach, taking her hand in his as she stood stiffly next to him, and the elation of their kiss drained away, he remembered the look they gave the camera at the end of The Graduate. The last, melancholy note that ended a scene that could have been joyful, hopeful, beautiful. The sense that not everything would be a fairytale. That perhaps they hadn't thought it through fully. That they were failing before they'd even truly started.

Rose's hand had been limp in his, her stare fixed on the sand where the TARDIS had sat, and the opportunity that kiss afforded had been ripped away from him as effectively as the previous had been, but with the painful added knowledge that they both remembered it, but that the memory was tainted enough that she never wanted to consider it.

He had no idea how long he'd held her there, memorizing the shape of her mouth with his tongue, but he was waiting until the desperation of their first kiss was gone from her memory before he let her go.

He could feel the light scrape of her nails against his scalp, her fingers woven into the hair he knew through proxies (Cassandra's transferring consciousness, Donna's description of her description of him) that she was really quite fond of. Her body was tucked closely against his, trapping him comfortably between her warmth and the cold of the tank behind him, half upright and half reclining, a hand splayed across the small of her back and the other holding hers against the tank.

He was more than content with kissing her. Elated. Ecstatic. Enthralled. Entranced. Other words that began with E, now that his mind had begun incessant alliterations, higher functions shutting down rapidly, leaving only the whittering portions that never seemed to completely stop, that took over when babbling was all he needed.

He broke the kiss slowly, traitorous human lungs burning from the need to breathe, and pulled her closer, shifting to change their position against the glass. He was only attempting to make up for the difference in their heights by angling himself more, hoisting her half braced on his thigh.

It was a simple plan, with relatively (relativity being important, though he was beginning to forget why) noble intentions. He'd have stopped at merely kissing her, done the gentlemanly thing and treated her like he'd want his Rose to be treated. He was in control, more or less, until in pulling her up against him, his leg between her thighs to keep her half-perched at his height, she dropped her chin, burying her face into the V of his shirt where his loosened tie hung uselessly, and swallowed down a low moan of desire at the friction.

All of his plans unraveled as rational thought left him, shattered by one muffled sound and the heat of her breath against the column of his throat.

Suddenly, he felt it raining down on him, leaving his skin flushed, his single heart racing. He could feel his pupils dilate, hungry for more detail, could feel chemical cocktails pour off of her skin, pinging off of his hypothalamus, his prefrontal cortex and brainstem in competition until thought succumbed to want. A haze of oxytocin, estradiol, pheremones spiking in the air around her, natural chemicals with complex compositions that together spelled out lust.

In their years travelling together, he had come to recognized the tang of it, had clinically filed the information away, stumbled through redirection or thrown them into adventure to diffuse whatever situation raised it before, and could look at it scientifically in fascination: The human female, aroused. Now he was not only the intended target but a receptive target, and he was drunk on it, biologically human enough that she was as potent as any drug.

He realized he'd frozen when she traced her fingertip across his lips, watching him through heavy lids, and lashes thick with mascara, all the hazel of her eyes wicked away into ink black. It was predatory and vulnerable and intentionally and unintentionally alluring, and he was transfixed by her stare and the heat of her against him.

"Doctor?"

The way she said his name. . .

He wasn't aware that he'd turned them until he felt the chilled glass of the tank against both of his palms, trapping her between the growing TARDIS and him. Through a supreme effort of will he held himself at arm's length, so that the only thing that touched her as he dipped back in was his lips, grazing along the shell of her ear. He could barely recognize his own voice, low and gravelly and raw as it was.

"Oh, Rose Tyler, you're going to be the death of me."

Bending his neck, his tongue dipped into the deep pool of her clavicle, tasting her skin, talented tongue sorting soap from salt to tingling sensation of arousal, before tracing her collar bone up to the hollow of her throat and laying a kiss there, drawing unsteady breaths and memorizing the scent of her all over again as her pulse thrummed against his lips. The freedom to touch her was almost overwhelming his common sense-he knew he didn't want to end their conversation this way. That throwing themselves from being estranged friends who barely spoke into lovers was unwise, rash, ill advised. . .

Long overdue.

"Tell me to stop, Rose. Please." She had always been there to pull him back from the brink, to tell him when to stop, to at least try to push sense into him when darker impulses took control. He needed her, now, needed her to tell him to wait. He'd wait for her forever, if she asked him. He just needed her to ask. . .

Instead she turned the tables, bracing against the glass with her back and hooking one foot out to twine her leg around his, pulling him flush against her again as she strained up towards his lips, using the silk of his tie to pull him down halfway to meet her.

"You said, Doctor, that you were mine if I wanted you. And I do." Her teeth grazed his lower lip, tongue soothing the playful nip immediately. "I want you."

He was intelligent enough to know when he'd lost, and he'd always been powerless in denying his pink and yellow human anything she wanted.

As she pushed him back away from the tank one step at a time, both of them nearly tangling their legs in his jacket as it hit the floor, his grin broke the seal of their kiss, his laughter rumbling in his chest, threatening to bubble out, coloring his words.

"Yep. Still got it."

His tie pulled free of his collar like a whipcrack, the back of his knees hit the rolling chair, and he decided that the squeak of the wheel was charming and that he'd been a fool for thinking it needed fixing.