The Doctor poked his head gingerly out of the front door of the TARDIS. What he saw was the angry red console room of his ship. Confused, he pulled his head back in. How could there be a console room on both sides of the door? It was as he poked his head out again that he saw someone standing in the other console room.
"Hello?" he asked cautiously. The figure stepped forward, and he saw himself. He looked terrible: exhausted, face contorted in misery, body sagging as though weighted by a coat made of lead. Was that how he looked now?
"It doesn't work," the other Doctor said without preamble. "Nothing I… we, try works."
"I don't understand," the Doctor replied.
The other Doctor gritted his teeth, clenching his jaw before seeming to pry it open to force the words out. "Rose still dies. I keep trying but nothing works."
"But… what?" the Doctor asked. "Where've you come from?"
"Rose came to talk to me… today, I think," he began. "Today might have been a month ago now, for all I know. It's hard to keep track when I keep repeating. She was distracted, but then she said something along the lines of warning me against crossing my own timeline, no matter what happened. I just thought she was referring to the other version of me that showed up in our room that morning. I suppose that was you?"
"No," the Doctor replied. "It wasn't me."
For a moment, both Doctors frowned in confusion, but then the other's expression returned to one of desolation. "Doesn't matter," he said. He picked up where he had left off. "I didn't really think too much of it, but… When she was gone, I tried to go back and change it. But then I saw the TARDIS vanishing."
"That was me," the Doctor said.
"That's when I realized that I must have already tried to warn her."
"She didn't listen?" the Doctor asked. "She drove into work anyway? But why?"
"She learned her lesson too well," the other said bitterly.
"What do you mean?"
"I went over to confront her, demand to know what happened," the other spoke in a monotone, reciting the events as detached as possible. "She was furious. Said I'd damaged time, and we were lucky nothing horrible had happened yet. She said she was thinking about the time she tried to save her Dad, and what had happened."
"That was different-" the Doctor said quickly, but was cut off by the other.
"I tried to argue that too," he said. "But she wasn't having it. Said I was risking the universe. I couldn't reason with her."
"So you just gave up?" the Doctor demanded.
"No," the other countered. "I tried going back further. Convince her to get in the TARDIS for a quick vacation, bring her back a few days later. She'd be in a right foul mood when she realized we'd arrived back off by a few days, but at least she'd live."
"Well, why didn't that work?"
"We've already been back too many times. Rose was right, in a way. We've made a small rift. Just enough to pull the TARDIS in."
"Right back to the same damn day," the Doctor realized, recalling the rift he had seen when running scans that morning. The other nodded despondently.
"As it turns out, there are multiple aborted timelines at work here. I have no idea how many. I ran into a couple of them. Apparently we've also tried using guilt to force her to change her mind, by telling Jackie and bringing her in. We've tried getting the police to close the road. We've tried finding the drunk driver and getting him out of there. We've even gotten desperate enough to try and force Rose not to leave – against her will."
"Never," the Doctor gasped, horrified.
"There are a lot of things we've done that we said we never would," the other countered. In any case, the point is that we really put a dent in time and space for that day. I thought the only way to avoid it was to go back and get her, and bring her away through space instead of time. But as soon as I set the coordinates back for Earth, we got pulled into the rift again, so I had to head back to the planet we were visiting. I couldn't tell her why without explaining everything."
"I bet she took that well," the Doctor said, the ghost of a smile playing at his lips.
"I've never seen her so angry," the other agreed. "We would have had to stay away forever to avoid that day, and she wasn't having it. I gave it one last shot, telling her I'd take her back if she would just please, please not get in the car."
"What did she say?"
"She said that maybe it was her time. That if I couldn't stop it, maybe there was a reason."
The Doctor shook his head vehemently. "No. I won't accept that."
"I couldn't watch her die again," the other Doctor continued as though he hadn't heard the protests. "Do you know; I was there on the side of the highway once? I thought I might be able to blow out that other car's tire with the sonic before he could drive her off of the road. But there were other cars in the way, and in any case, that would likely have just caused a pile-up and killed even more people, wouldn't it?" He didn't wait for a response before continuing. "When the car came towards her she tried to swerve and avoid it, but it ran her right of the road. She hit a tree. Car was crumpled up and had her pinned. But that's not what killed her. Would you like to know what did?"
He didn't, but he had clenched his jaw so tightly that he couldn't release it to tell the other so.
"A tree branch," the other Doctor said. His eyes were unfocussed, looking at the scene from his memory. "It went right through the windscreen, straight through her. She didn't have a chance. I didn't know that right away of course; I had to go and see. Branch was sticking right out the middle of her chest. There wasn't as much blood as you might expect, the branch stopped it from flowing I suppose, and it also put a stop to her heart. I think it might have pierced right through it-"
"Stop it," the Doctor spat, finally finding his voice. "Just stop." He had seen plenty of dead bodies in his time, but the gruesome picture painted in his mind's eye was too much to handle. He felt like he was going to be sick.
Having no sympathy, or perhaps having been so emotionally wrecked by what he had witnessed, the other Doctor picked up the tale in his expressionless monotone again. "So I came in here and set up the paradox, allowing us both to be here at the same time. I knew you'd get pulled into the rift at some point and I'd bring you right here."
"What was the point of that?"
"To tell you… I can't think of anything else to try."
"There's got to be something – I won't give up!"
The other doctor looked up at him with tired, empty, eyes. "That's what I'm trying to tell you," he said flatly. "You have given up."