"What are you doing?"

Surprised, she sat up. The Doctor was standing over her, hands in his pockets, head blocking out the sun.

"Watching the clouds." Rose was lying on the grass outside the Tyler mansion, propped up on her elbows, head tilted towards the sky.

"What?" He sprawled on the ground next to her, eyebrows raised.

"You know how when you're a kid, you sometimes spend forever looking at the sky, looking for shapes in the clouds and all that?" she explained, still staring up at the fluffy white clouds. "That's what I'm doing. I haven't had time to do something stupid like this for ages."

"Nor have I, I suppose," he said, a bit doubtfully, glancing up at the sky and back to Rose again.

A few minutes of peaceful cloud-gazing later, she asked, "Do you ever miss stuff like that? Stupid, fun things like looking or clouds or, I dunno, building snowmen or something? Just all the silly stuff humans do just 'cause it's fun?"

He didn't answer for a very long time, and when he finally spoke, he didn't seem to be answering properly anyway. "A lot has happened to me since I last saw you, since Canary Wharf and Bad Wolf Bay. And some things... I had to become human." He said it very suddenly, quickly, as though scared she'd be angry.

"What- like you are now?" she asked, confused.

"No, fully, completely human. I rewrote my biology. Incredibly painful, and it made me forget everything. All about time travel, and other worlds, and even who I was. I ended up as a schoolteacher in 1913. And...I fell in love."

"You did what?" Her voice was loud, disbelieving, almost angry.

"I fell in love." He wasn't looking at her, preferring to watch the sky as he spoke. "With a human. Joan Redfern. She worked at the school. And... when I had to change myself back into a Time Lord to stop some aliens, right before I did, I saw a whole life. I saw exactly what my life would have been like if I had stayed human, stayed with Joan."

He stopped speaking, staring the clouds but clearly looking beyond them, back into the past.

"What did you see?" she asked quietly, looking at him obliquely.

"Everything." He looked as though he was torn between grinning and crying. "A wedding, a birth, a family, and"-his eyes went dark and hard, but somehow softer, more human than before-"a death."

"Whose death?"

"Mine." He went quiet, soul bleeding out through his eyes, a million different impossible emotions, stuffed away just beneath the surface but pouring out in his eyes, eyes Rose couldn't help watching even though they were fixed on things far beyond what she could see.

"I'm sorry." That wasn't what she wanted to say, but it was the only thing she could think to say, two stupid, meaningless words that never managed to help but were so often the only things anyone could offer.

"But that's not why I'm telling you." He was looking at her again, eyes nearly clear of the wild humanity that had been there moments ago. "I'm saying, that's what I miss. Not the stupid stuff like watching clouds, because if I wanted to, I could do that. The things I miss are the things I can't do, the things that are some the best parts of every person's life. I skip the pointless stuff by choice, but I don't do the things that matter because I have to."

"But now you don't."

"That's true." All of a sudden he was grinning, his huge, stupid, isn't-life-brilliant grin. "I could get married, if I wanted to."

"Not necessarily," she said, laughing, the return to more light-hearted subjects entirely welcome. "You'd have to find someone who'd marry you first."

"Where would I find someone like that?" he said, one eyebrow raised.

The tone of the conversation changed subtly, shifting towards topics that were not exactly displeasing but slightly awkward nonetheless.

"Try Torchwood."

"What?" His eyebrow dropped, confusion setting in.

"They're nerds who spend their days obsessing over aliens; you're a nerd who is an alien. It's sort of perfect," she said seriously.

"The Torchwood people fight aliens. They would try to kill me, or at minimum dissect me."

"Oh, I'm sure there'd be someone there who wouldn't want that," she said with a slight smile.

"On an unrelated note, where do you work, Rose?"

"Shut up." She rolled her eyes, laughing.

He took her hand. "Do you want to keep watching clouds?"

"Do you mind?"

"No."

"Even though it's stupid?"

"Some stupid things are still worth doing."

"Good."