The senior staff meeting is a bit intimidating, at first.

Rose gets to the briefing room on Deck Two fifteen minutes ahead of oh-eight-hundred, only to find that there's nobody there just yet. It's almost eerily quiet in the room – there's no sound except her own breathing and the gentle, omnipresent hum of a spaceship in flight.

She picks one of the chairs by the head of the long conference table, near the viewport that looks out on the stars outside, and wonders at how fast all of this is happening. It's barely been twenty-four hours since she came aboard the TARDIS, and Rose has already been attacked and held prisoner by sentient vegetation, piloted a Harmony-class starship under battle conditions, and been promoted to a senior staff position that she'd imagined would take years to work up to.

Her head is still spinning a bit when Donna strolls into the room a few minutes later, trailed by a pretty, dark-skinned woman – the "Martha" who'd met them in the transporter room the day before. The other woman introduces herself as Dr. Jones, chief medical officer, and gives her a firm handshake and a genuine smile. Rose likes her immediately.

The rest of the senior officers drift in steadily over the next few minutes, and for the most part they're all just as friendly as Martha. Lt. Commander McShane is a bit…intense, but Rose imagines tactical officers sort of have to be. Lieutenant Pond – chief of engineering, and the owner of the angry Scottish voice she'd heard over the comm channel on the bridge – acts as though they're already best mates. She pulls up a chair right beside Rose at the briefing table, and says, with mock seriousness, "I'm Amy. Welcome to hell."

On the other side of the briefing table, Donna snickers.


Rose had imagined that the promotion meant she wouldn't get much time away from the ship – that she'd be on the bridge most of the time, observing away missions from a distance, hearing about them secondhand at briefings. She'd been a little sad about that. Flying is brilliant, and she wouldn't trade that seat at the very front of the bridge for anything, but standing there on that alien planet, next to the Doctor, with the snow falling around them–

Well, that had been brilliant too.

It turns out that Rose needn't have worried too much, though. She's still on the bridge most of the time, as she's responsible for the bulk of navigation and maneuvers. But whenever they happen upon an interesting planet or nebula or random bit of space junk, the Doctor seems to want her along for the ride. He's always dragging her away from the helm, leaving whoever's on co-piloting duty to maintain the ship's orbit.

The Doctor himself never seems to miss an away mission. It's highly irregular, really, for the captain to spend as much time off-ship as he does. Rose is fairly certain that Donna logs more time as the ranking officer on the bridge than the Doctor ever does – though he always seem to be there when Rose is, sprawled in the command seat while he reads through daily operations reports, or while he bickers with Donna about whether or not a captain's log is something he actually needs to keep.

Rose asks him about it once, quite early on. It's maybe a month or so into the tour, on the latest of a string of away missions which have just been her and the Doctor, getting into improbable scrapes in impossible places and somehow always coming out on top.

"So why am I here, exactly? Here, and not, I don't know, flying the ship?" Rose asks, a bit irritably, from a crouched position behind a rock formation somewhere on the surface of Erronos V. There are twigs in her hair and her knees are scraped up quite badly, and she's really got no idea why it was so vital for her to be down here with the slavering, homicidal inhabitants of this decidedly not civilized planet.

The Doctor looks at her with genuine confusion. "Because you're–" The sound of feet crunching on loose rocks distracts them both, for a moment, before it quiets and he turns back to her. "You're brilliant at this – the running, and the daft shuttle piloting, and the first contacts. You notice things. Like the fact that the readings in the temple were so strange, earlier. We'd be dead if you hadn't noticed that." Suddenly, the Doctor seems very interested in his sonic screwdriver, staring very determinedly at it – and not her – as he continues. "You're – you're Rose."

Then the gentle sound of rocks shifting under feet becomes harsher. Their pursuers are running now, and conversation falls by the wayside as they take off in an attempt to outpace them.

Rose means to bring it up again, later. She means to push about what exactly he meant, means to make him look her in the eyes while he says it. But there's angry Nellosians and a little bit of phaser fire and a really outrageous amount of running, and by the time they're back on the ship, breathing heavily and clinging to each other for support on the transporter pad, she's lost her nerve.

The days start to bleed into each other, not because they're boring, but rather because they never run out of things to do. There's always something new to see, somewhere new to go, some new course to plot and some new thing to run from – or towards – and suddenly four months have already passed, and five years doesn't seem like nearly enough time to be out here.

Rose wants to keep doing this forever.


It's fairly quiet in the mess hall, today. Apart from Rose and her lunch date, there are only a dozen or so other people around, and she's quite content to just sit and enjoy the quiet. Always having something to do is brilliant, to be sure, but it's still good to have a moment to herself, now and then. It's nice to be able to just relax with her chips and her cup of tea and her datapad and bask in the calm that will inevitably be shattered sometime soon – by an attack, or an away mission, or a call from the Doctor saying Rose, you have to come see this.

Then Amy speaks up.

"So, you and the Doctor," Amy says indelicately, around a mouthful of replicated potato. "What's that like?"

Rose is only half paying attention, immersed in the results of a test she'd run on the last away mission, and Amy's words mostly go in one ear and out the other. "What's what like?"

Amy rolls her eyes. "Oh, come on, I promise I won't blab to anyone. I'm dying to know, though." She waves her fork animatedly, then spears another chip with it. "I mean, it's the Doctor."

Rose gapes at her, for a moment, before spluttering, "We're not like that!" It comes out a bit louder than she intended, and a few heads turn towards their table. Rose flushes a bit and squirms in her seat, fixing her eyes back on the datapad and willing herself to look engrossed.

Amy looks altogether unconvinced. "Right. And I'm Vulcan," she says dryly, through another bite.

Rose looks at her sharply. "I'm serious, Amy. We're not like that at all. We're just– "

She stops, because she'd been about to say friends, but she's not quite certain that it's true.

No. That's not right. Rose knows they're friends. There isn't anyone on the ship that she spends more time with. They're constantly on away missions together. Even when they're not he's still just a few feet behind her, making wisecracks about her driving from the captain's chair – or making himself at home on the desk she still occasionally occupies in astrometrics, leaning up against it while she tries to plot a navigation chart, or sitting across from her just like Amy's doing now, chattering amiably while Rose eats her chips and chatters right back.

They're definitely friends. What she doesn't know is if they're more than friends.

Amy doesn't give her time to finish thinking, offering up her own opinion instead. "Inseparable? Insufferable? Arse-over-elbows in love?" she says impishly.

Rose drops her head to the table with a thunk.

"He's the captain, Amy," she mumbles miserably, into the metal tabletop.

"There, there." Amy pats Rose's head in mock sympathy. "Why should that stop you? You're both consenting adults, both senior staff, and it's not like there aren't any…liaisons already going on here on the good ship TARDIS." Rose looks up just in time to see Amy wiggle her eyebrows suggestively. "There's me and Rory, but you know that. Ian and Barbara, in the science division, they've been carrying on for ages. And I know for a fact that one of my ensigns is sleeping with that pretty brunette transporter technician." Amy shrugs. "Even if he is the captain, it's not technically against regulations."

Rose slowly heaves herself back up, attempting to regain some of her composure. "I don't even think he'd be interested."

Amy barely has time to snort in disbelief before Rose's combadge beeps softly, followed by the Doctor's voice, tinny and electronic over the comm channel. "Rose! Need you in Transporter Room One! We've got a planet to visit!"

Rose groans. Amy laughs.


The away mission is to another M-class planet – Urraka, it's called.

This one, though, has no snow and no sentient plant life. In fact, it's about as different from her first experience on an alien planet as possible. The landscape is barren and vaguely desert-like, covered with oddly-shaped rock formations in vibrant shades of red and orange. It reminds Rose a little of the wildly inaccurate depictions of Mars she'd seen in Mickey's comic books, back when they were kids.

The locals here also appear to be much friendlier than the walking, talking bushes of the planet they'd later learned was called Alloxis IV. They're humanoid, with disconcertingly translucent skin, a very basic grasp of spaceflight technology, and a magpie-like approach to life. Their houses and cities are a hodgepodge of scavenged tech and architecture from across the quadrant. Rose recognizes computer parts from Mira Six in the capital city's mainframe, and can tell that the entire central aqueduct system appears to have been lifted from the colony worlds of Kyrrock.

The home of the local magistrate, who has agreed to stand as a representative in the negotiation of terms for peaceful passage through this sector, is so full to bursting of collected bits and bobs that it feels like a museum. There are artifacts and bits of technology closed up in glass display cases all over the central hall, where they've been left to wait, and the walls are lined with shelves full of loose items. There's also a thin layer of gritty dust over the whole place that makes it smell earthy and a bit like a tomb. Rose can't quite tell if that's just a quirk of this planetary environment, or if no one ever actually touches any of the salvage piled up here – if they just collect it and catalogue it and stow it away.

Regardless of which it is, the Doctor is in heaven.

"Rose! Look at this!" The Doctor's voice comes from across the central hall. He's plastered against one of the glass display cases, studying the piece of tech within while gesturing for Rose to come over. "It's a tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator!"

Rose rolls her eyes and makes her way over to him. "I understood maybe two of those words, and I got very good grades in my engineering courses."

The Doctor has pulled a pair of glasses out of one of his trouser pockets and moved around to the other side of the case, examining the item inside with rapt fascination. "It's marvelous, really. Absolutely gorgeous technology."

Rose smiles at his obvious enthusiasm. "Care to inform the rest of the class what it does?"

The Doctor has just opened his mouth to answer her when the sound of a throat being cleared pre-empts him. They both turn, towards the archway that leads from the hall into the rest of the house, to see a smartly dressed Urrakan (the magistrate, Rose assumes) standing there and eyeing them appraisingly.

Rose doesn't care for the way he looks at her and the Doctor – sizing them up, as though they're objects he might be able to acquire for his little collection of artifacts here, like butterflies pinned to a card and hung up on the wall.

"Does he sort of give you the shivers?" she asks the Doctor quietly, as they're following the magistrate through the corridors off the main hall, presumably to wherever the negotiations will take place.

The Doctor considers, for a moment, before saying "Nah. He's just a little – odd. That's it. Odd. There's lots of people who're odd but not – off. Like me. Right? Odd but not off. Pretty sure I've heard myself described that way."

Rose just smiles at him and doesn't answer.

"Right, Rose? Right?"


Twenty minutes later, when they're unceremoniously tossed into a small, dark room, Rose refrains from saying I told you so.

"Oi!" The Doctor shouts at the closed door behind them. He gives it a sound kick before wincing and yelling again. "What's all this for? If you wanted something, you could've just said! No need for all this prisoner nonsense!"

While the Doctor shouts at the door that isn't likely to shout back, Rose starts trying to parse out how big this room is, and whether there's any means of escape. Her hands find a wall in the dark, and she drags them along the hard rock surface until coming across something metal. It's a control panel of some kind, and fiddling with the knobs and dials brings up a bit more light in the room – harsh, fluorescent light, but light all the same.

She's about to tell the Doctor to stop abusing the door and come help her accomplish something when another voice, electronic and stuttering, croaks out his name instead. It splits it into two hard syllables, spit angrily out into the air, and Rose can see the Doctor go absolutely, completely still at the sound.

"DOC–TOR."

The Doctor turns, slowly, and Rose can see that all of the color has drained out of his face. The flush and excitement of their latest adventure has been replaced with something else – something she's never really seen in him before, not once in all the months they've been narrowly avoiding danger, skirting around near-death experiences once before breakfast and twice before lunch.

Fear.