"Have you ever heard of a planet called Gallifrey?"

Rose doesn't even have time to answer before the Doctor shakes his head, looking away from her and back towards the console. "No, you couldn't have. Hardly anyone has." He motions towards her with the hand not tapping at the console screen, indicating she should come to join him.

Rose makes her way over to the desk just in time to see the Doctor click through a screen displaying the word CLASSIFIED. "Doctor?" she asks, hesitantly. "Is this something I've got clearance to see?"

The Doctor doesn't answer her. Instead, he continues to tap at the console, sifting through a hodgepodge assortment of text, pictures, and what appear to be intelligence reports from a number of Federation governments until he reaches one in particular.

It's a three-dimensional model of a planet — a large orange-red sphere that rotates slowly on the screen. It's a crystal-clear image, but there are clouds swirling across the surface of the planet, and Rose can only just make out the hazy shapes of continents beneath them.

"This is Gallifrey," the Doctor says. "It's where I'm from."

His face is expressionless, giving no hint as to what direction this conversation is going; no clue as to what Rose ought to do or say. So she settles for the most neutral question possible.

"What happened?"

The Doctor visibly sags, dropping bonelessly into his desk chair like a puppet with its strings cut. Rose seats herself on the desk, and there are a few moments of thick silence while she sits there, swinging her legs back and forth and staring at the Doctor, whose eyes are still fixed on the image of the orange-red planet rotating silently on the screen.

When he does speak, his voice is very quiet. "There was a war." The Doctor takes in a deep breath, like he's steeling himself to push the rest of the words out. "There was a war, and we lost."

The declaration makes Rose narrow her eyes at him in confusion. "But there hasn't been open conflict in the Alpha Quadrant for decades," she says. There are border skirmishes with the Klingons, now and then, but war? There's never been war, not in Rose's lifetime.

"That's because, weeell—" The Doctor draws out the last word before laughing humorlessly. "Gallifrey was a lot of things, but open was certainly never one of them."

He takes a deep breath before continuing. "It started as a colony planet, you see. Beautiful place, though way out in the back of beyond — not much of a destination planet, though that sort of worked out well for their purposes. It was — or it was supposed to be — a community of scientists and scholars, dedicated to cutting-edge research and study for the Federation. Mostly classified projects, very tip-top-secret. And they were good at it. Brilliant, in fact. Made tremendous advances in engineering and physics and medicine — and, most impressively, in temporal mechanics."

Rose can't help raising an eyebrow. "Time travel? Really?"

Her skepticism seems to amuse the Doctor enough to bring a genuine smile to his face. "Really. Don't know that they ever really cracked it, but they managed quite a lot — and it's really only a matter of time on that front, if the reports from the Enterprise are to be believed."

"Sounds like an amazing place," Rose interrupts, seeing that the Doctor is clearly gearing up for a good, solid ramble — and while the viability of time travel is certainly an interesting topic, it's not what they need to be discussing right now. "But you left?"

The Doctor nods, looking back at the revolving image of Gallifrey on the console screen. "It only sounds amazing. Take it from someone who grew up there — it really wasn't."

"See, my home planet — well, they were stone cold brilliant, honestly. World full of geniuses, though you'd never know it for how shockingly dull they were most of the time." He reaches out a hand towards the spinning holographic planet, as if meaning to touch it. It's just an image, though — no touch capability in this file — and his fingers go right through it. "But they knew it, and it made them arrogant. Fancied themselves above the rest of the galaxy, they did. And the sort of research they'd gotten into, by the time I left — well, let's just say it wasn't exactly Federation-sanctioned anymore."

"What sort of research?" Rose asks. Judging by the look on the Doctor's face, it's not a question she's really sure she wants the answer to, but the words slip out of her mouth before she can stop herself.

The Doctor hesitates for a moment, and Rose is about to say that he doesn't have to answer when he speaks again. "Temporal manipulation. Constructing artificial spatial anomalies." There's another pause before he continues. "Induced extrasensory perception. Genetic engineering, too. And those are just the really splashy ones."

"And that's — that's why you left?"

He lets out another choked sort of laugh. "Would that I could say that. That I had a noble reason. But no, that's not why. I just couldn't stand the — the sitting. The waiting and watching. There's so much to see, out here in the galaxy, and all they ever wanted to do on Gallifrey was sit there and look at it through a microscope — pick it apart and record it and manipulate it."

The Doctor taps at the console again, closing the three-dimensional model of Gallifrey. "I stayed on-planet for a few decades, after I came of age. It's what was expected, and I hadn't quite gotten up the courage to tell them all to stuff it just yet."

A small smile passes over his face then, as if recalling a fond memory. "A Starfleet admiral came to visit, once. Gave me all sorts of ideas, he did. Said I ought to try applying to the Academy, that I'd have a good head for it." The Doctor's small smile turns wicked. "So I did. Didn't tell anyone I'd applied, mind. And once I got accepted I tore off-planet as fast as I could. Stole a ship, set course for Earth, and never looked back. Not until the war."

There are so many questions Rose wants to ask in response to that huge block of information, but one swims at the forefront of her mind, unable to mesh with the idea of the Doctor that she's constructed in the time she's known him. "Decades?" she asks, knowing full well that she must sound quite dumbfounded. "But you're not — your service record—" The Doctor's personnel file indicates at least fifteen years of Starfleet service, not counting time spent at the Academy as a cadet, and she'd pegged him for late thirties at the most — maybe a very well-preserved forty.

"I'm older than I look, Rose." The Doctor gives her a brittle, halfhearted smile. "Genetic engineering, remember? Gallifrey was very big on the idea that research begins at home. Where better to start than their own children?"

Rose's stomach turns. "That's illegal."

The Doctor shrugs and rubs a hand across the back of his neck. "It happened. It's done. It wasn't my choice, but — well, it's not all bad, really. After all, it's kept this face — which I think is frankly quite dashing — looking quite young for quite a long time now." He sighs, bringing the hand on the back of his neck around to rub at his face instead.

Rose shakes her head, trying to move past that particular revelation and onto the more pressing topic. "But there was a war?" Rose asks, trying her best not to sound skeptical. "A war nobody knows about?" Nobody except Starfleet Command, by the looks of these files.

The Doctor nods, his expression darkening as he brings up another file on the console. It's another three-dimensional model — this time of the same kind of creature that had attacked them on Urraka. Of a Dalek. "Yes."

"What are those things, then?" she asks. "You said they're called Daleks?"

The Doctor nods solemnly. "They are — were — from a planet called Skaro." He pauses, for a moment, before continuing. "Remember how I said that Gallifrey was researching the construction of artificial spatial anomalies?" he asks. "Well, they weren't just any garden-variety anomalies. They were trying to construct an artificial wormhole."

Rose boggles at that. "An artificial wormhole?" she asks. "To where? Why?"

The Doctor shrugs. "Why do humans ever do anything?" he muses. "Because we can, I suppose."

"Anyways," he continues, "the wormhole. It was a long-term project, had been going on since before I was born. It was fairly successful, on paper — they managed connections of nanoseconds, at the very beginning, and then milliseconds, and seconds. And then they made contact with the other side."

"I take it that they didn't come in peace?" Rose asks timidly.

"At first, it didn't seem like there was anything wrong — at least, that's what they told me later. Not like seconds of contact can tell you much, but first contact did at least indicate a spaceflight-capable society, albeit one that was in the middle of some sort of conflict. They tried to keep opening it, but every time they did the picture of the world on the other side — Skaro, they found out it was called — got more and more grim. Their war was getting more and more terrible."

The Doctor rubs a hand over his face again. "I don't know if the wormhole was temporally unstable, connecting to different points in Skaro's history every time, or if the Daleks were always scheming for a way to get through it, but one day our scientists went to open the wormhole and it….held. Held like it'd never held before, kept open from the other side."

"The Daleks poured through, and they started slaughtering people right off the bat. I'm still not sure why, but they were the ultimate in racial cleansing — immensely powerful and absolutely certain that anything not Dalek was wrong."

"It was, in some ways, a good thing that Gallifrey took the brunt of the attack. Anywhere else and the Daleks would've been able to jump off-planet and spread through the rest of the quadrant almost immediately." He chuckles hollowly. "But all that unsanctioned research ended up being good for something. They gave the Daleks a run for their money, kept them contained to one planet. Even manipulated time to keep them locked there, on-planet and distracted."

The Doctor turns his eyes to the image of the Dalek on the screen, though it looks more like he's staring through it than at it. "I'm still not sure how long I was even there, in the middle of things. They called me back at the beginning, before the first Dalek actually came through. Sometimes I'm sure it was only days, and other times I'm certain it was decades."

Another sigh, and the Doctor taps at the console, closing the model of the Dalek. "Regardless, by the time I got there — long before the first Dalek came through — they were already in way over their heads. The things I saw—" The Doctor shakes his head, as if to clear the implied images from his mind. "The wormhole was stabilizing more and more every day, and even after Daleks started coming through the connection was getting stronger. The only way to stop them, to cut off the invasion force, was to close it. But Gallifrey had poured so much power into the mainframe supporting the wormhole, connected the whole bloody planet's electrical grids into it—"

A cold pit of dread is beginning to form in the pit of Rose's stomach. "—and so closing the wormhole would destroy the planet."

"I didn't even want to be there," he says, so quietly it's almost a whisper. "I was just out of the Academy, on temporary leave from Starfleet. Got a message from home insisting it was urgent, that they were calling back everyone who could do anything to help with a problem — not that there were many people off-planet that weren't me — and I thought it was just some daft attempt to get me to come home."

The Doctor looks up at her then, and the raw despair in his eyes makes Rose want to pull him close and never let him go. "I had to, Rose," he croaks desperately. "I was the only one in a position to do it, and it was one planet — one fairly sparsely populated planet—" he spits the words out mechanically, as if he's reading them from an incident report, "or the whole Alpha Quadrant. Maybe the whole galaxy."

"But it was still your home." Rose says, as gently as she can. "Doctor, it's—"

She doesn't know what to say. Okay? Horrible? A beyond-impossible choice?

In the end, Rose can't think of anything to do except take the Doctor's hands, where they're lying limply on his lap, and hold on tight. "You made the right choice," she finally manages. "You did. And it's all right. It's done."

"But we don't know that, do we?" he asks quietly. "We still don't know where Skaro even was — the Delta Quadrant, if we're very lucky — or if the explosion from the wormhole closure really rippled backwards like I hoped it would. Clearly," he says darkly, "we can't even be sure I cleared them out of this quadrant."

Then the Doctor looks straight at her again, eyes shining. "They were supposed to be gone, Rose. They weren't supposed to touch any of this — anything I loved — ever again," he rasps brokenly, and her heart jumps at the word love just as his voice hitches on it. "It was supposed to be over."

Rose can't think of what to say that hasn't already been said, so instead she lets go of the Doctor's hands to wrap her arms around him instead. He clings to her, more than a little desperately, and they just sit there — together, in the dark of the room and the dim light of the stars — for a very long time.

Rose isn't sure what she was expecting to happen, after all of that. For things to go back to normal, perhaps — as normal as things ever get on the TARDIS, at least. Maybe for the Doctor to be a little skittish for a while, before they went right back to running for their lives on a regular basis and made that sort of awkwardness a moot point. Possibly for him to avoid bringing up anything they've spoken about ever again.

In her more optimistic moods, Rose had hoped that maybe it would mean they'd be…closer. She'd imagined that maybe this was the crack in the metaphorical dam; that maybe it meant he'd open up more often, let her in a little more regularly, instead of fobbing her off with smiles — which, while dazzling, are not always genuine. It makes her feel greedy, almost petty, how much she wants that from him — especially given what he's now shared with her — but she wants it, all the same.

What she doesn't expect is for the Doctor to pull away from her.

It's nothing sudden or dramatic — not at first, anyways. The Doctor still smiles at her when she walks onto the bridge, still makes warm and friendly conversation when they're together in the turbolift or in line to use the replicator in the mess hall. He still jokes with her from the captain's chair when they're on bridge duty together.

But he stops paging her at odd hours to babble about how fascinating this particular star cluster or that specific nebula is. He doesn't invite her into his ready room during shift breaks.

And he stops bringing her on away missions.

At first Rose doesn't mind. From a personnel standpoint, it's never made much sense for the Doctor to bring her along as often as he does. It doesn't even make sense for him to go on away missions as often as he does, let alone for the helmsman to be his first away team selection regardless of the mission type. So when they come into orbit around an M-class planet with green skies, yellow trees, and a rigid, militaristic society that seems more than a bit hostile, Rose really doesn't mind that he takes Lt. Commander McShane along. She doesn't mind that it means she has to sit at her seat on the bridge while they're on the ground and the TARDIS is in orbit, twiddling her thumbs and monitoring their comm frequencies with twice the vigilance of the communications officer on duty.

Rose doesn't mind when the Doctor takes Martha along on the trip after that, either — it's got a toxic atmosphere, after all, and it makes sense to have a medical professional along to monitor the health of the away team during the mission. She can't find it in her to mind that he brings Amy along next, because her friend comes back from Tynnia positively gushing about their advanced propulsion systems, and how she can't wait to try incorporating some of those principles into the TARDIS' systems.

It goes on for weeks, the so-called 'not minding' — and the not talking about the fact that any of it is happening at all. Rose waffles between desperately wanting to confront the Doctor about this dramatic change in his behavior and hoping that if she just pretends nothing is wrong, eventually everything will go back to normal.

Unsurprisingly, it isn't Rose or the Doctor who actually broaches the issue first. It's Donna.

It's late in the afternoon cycle, about three and a half weeks after Urraka, and Rose and Donna's duty shifts have just ended for the day. They're catching a bite to eat in the mess hall with Martha, who's on a break halfway through her own shift. Well, Martha and Donna are eating. Rose is mostly poking at her replicated spaghetti bolognese and trying not to overanalyze the way the Doctor smiled at her yesterday afternoon, or the way he said morning, Rose to her earlier today, or the way he'd very determinedly avoided looking at her the day before when Donna had asked For God's sake, why don't you just put Rose on the away team?

When he'd not even entertained the possibility of bringing her along.

"So Rose, spill." Donna's playful, curious voice startles Rose out of her reverie. "Did you and Spaceman have a row? 'Cause something's certainly got his knickers in a twist about you."

"How many times do I have to say it?" Rose snaps. "We're not like that, Donna."

She regrets her harsh response almost immediately. Surprise — along with the slightest bit of hurt — flashes across Donna's face, and Rose instantly wants to snatch the words back. She isn't angry at Donna, not really. She's not even angry at the Doctor, when it comes right down to it. Frustrated, for sure, because he's being inscrutable in the extreme, but not angry, not really.

If there's anyone she's angry at, it's herself. Angry that she's become this person — this woman who snaps at her friends and analyzes every move the man she's not even seeing makes, because they're not talking about the fact that they're not talking, and because even while he seems to be pushing her away it doesn't stop her from wanting.

There are so many reasons she shouldn't want anything more, reasons she shouldn't' do anything more. They work together. He's her superior officer — her commanding officer — and it might not technically be against regulations, but the very last thing Rose wants is for it to seem like she only got her position by sleeping her way up the ladder.

But somehow, none of those things seem particularly important when he's holding her hand, or smiling at her, or saying Rose Tyler in that very particular way he has — and the push-pull of should-shouldn't-want to-can't is made a thousand times more confusing by the way the Doctor's behavior gets more and more indecipherable by the hour.

"I'm sorry, Donna," she apologizes. "I didn't mean to snap. I just—"

"He's being a bloody great idiot," Martha interjects, matter-of-factly. "We can all see it. Just don't know why. Thought you might, seeing as it's you he's being an idiot about."

"I wish I knew," Rose says quietly. Donna, who is sitting next to her, reaches around to give her a one-armed hug, and Rose leans into it gratefully.

"I'll bash some sense into him, if you like," Donna mutters, into the side of Rose's head. "I swear the man's a bloody Martian when it comes to relationships."

Martha snorts in amusement — and agreement — and the tense, dreary mood is broken for the moment.

Rose goes back to her quarters after the meal is over. She doesn't have anywhere to be until the next day cycle, when her 0700 bridge shift starts, but she can't stand the pitying looks Donna and Martha are giving her when they think she isn't looking. So she putters around on her own, a bit listlessly — takes a shower, makes a few halfhearted attempts to clean her quarters, does a little bit of reading.

Around 2300 hours, Rose decides she ought to try getting some sleep.

By 0300, she still hasn't managed a wink.

So Rose gets up, pulls on her uniform — more out of habit than necessity, as she's still technically not on duty — and asks the computer to tell her where the captain is.

The computer informs her that the captain is in Engineering.

As on most starships, the engineering floor on the TARDIS is dominated by the warp core. However, because the TARDIS is the TARDIS, it's no ordinary piece of machinery.

The metaphorical heart of the ship is a glowing green column in the center of the engineering floor. The conduits and reaction assembly are made of the same dull metal that's found all over the ship, plus some sort of experimental compound that looks vaguely organic. It all comes together to produce an image that's quite unlike anything Rose has ever seen in other Starfleet ships — a little bit mad-scientist and a little bit slapdash, with very little of the streamlined and polished appearance of other starships.

Rose's first impression of the engineering floor was that, apart from the warp core, it looked a bit like everything was held together with string and chewing gum.

(Privately, Amy has confided in her that this isn't too far off the mark).

However, old and patched-up though it may be, the TARDIS is a well-oiled, well-loved machine. Between Amy and the Doctor, whose pre-command background is in engineering, and who still takes a great interest in his ship's maintenance, Rose is fairly certain that there isn't a more beloved ship in the galaxy.

When she walks onto the floor, there is only one ensign there to give her an odd look — Nina, Rose thinks her name is. There is only a skeleton crew up and about at the moment, as it's the middle of the night cycle, and the poor girl looks positively dead on her feet as she nods at Rose and mumbles "Lieutenant."

The Doctor is leaning against the railings that surround the warp core, waist pressed up against the metal and elbows resting on top of it. He shouldn't really be here either, as he's off duty, too. But the Doctor doesn't sleep much, and Rose knows that in the wee hours he tends to wander, puttering around the TARDIS and bothering whichever crew members drew the short straw that is the late-night shift. She wonders, now, if what she always figured was just one of the Doctor's many quirks might actually be a byproduct of the genetic engineering — that he might not sleep much because he doesn't actually have to.

Rose walks up to join him, resting her elbows on the railing and bending over it to take up the same position he's holding. She doesn't say anything, though she'd spent the whole walk here from her quarters rehearsing different approaches to this encounter — different things she wants to say, different questions she wants to ask.

Standing next to him on the quiet engineering floor, where the only noise is the soft, almost musical hum of the warp core, nothing she thought about saying seems quite right. It's hardly the first time they've been alone together since he told her about the war, about his planet. They've had dozens of conversations in the turbolift or on the bridge, but they've all been either shallow or work-related, words exchanged out of habit or necessity. This is different, deliberate, heavy and important in a way it hasn't been since the topic of conversation was devastation on a massive scale.

However, as it turns out, Rose doesn't have to say anything at all. The Doctor speaks first, with the same phrase he'd used to open the last real conversation they'd had. "I'm sorry."

Rose is surprised and not, all at once; surprised that he's acknowledged that he's got something to be sorry for, and not surprised that his first response, to this problem as with so many others, is to apologize. It's something she's heard him say so many times — to her, to Donna, to aliens and admirals all across the quadrant when he realizes that he's said something rude, or that there's a problem too big for him to fix, or that something terrible is about to happen that he's too late to stop.

"For what?" Rose has to know, specifically, what he thinks he's apologizing for. For the mess with the Dalek, again? For shutting her out, without a word as to why? For generally being a prat?

She doesn't know which is the answer she wants, but it doesn't stop her wanting one.

The Doctor, however, doesn't answer her. He doesn't even look at her. Instead, he looks up towards the warp core. The humming column emits a constant light that bathes his face in an soft green glow, making his freckles stand out unnaturally against his pale skin.

There are a few beats of silence before he finally says, "I've never needed anyone before."

Whatever Rose was expecting, it wasn't that. She's not really sure what that means.

The Doctor continues, still gazing up at the softly humming warp core as though it has something to tell him. "I've had lots of friends. Have lots of friends, really. Family, too, though they're, well—" He clears his throat uncomfortably. "Anyways, I've known lots of people, over the years. Enjoyed knowing them, too. Love getting to know people. It's why I love Starfleet. All the traveling and exploring, meeting new people in new places every single day." A half-smile creeps onto the Doctor's face, tugging up one corner of his mouth, and Rose finds herself matching the expression almost reflexively.

"But everyone leaves, in the end." The smile is still on his face, but the Doctor's voice is hollow. They get new assignments, go to new ships. They find something better, or newer. Sometimes they get hurt. Sometimes they die. Sometimes it's my fault."

Rose places one of her hands on the Doctor's arm — to comfort, him, maybe, or encourage him — and he draws in a shaky breath before speaking again. "Theoretically, I could outlive all of them, given the opportunity. That was the aim of the genetic engineering, after all — to create longer-lived, more genetically superior human beings. Don't know for sure how long I'll live, though. The research data's all gone now. Burned." He chuckles darkly. "And it's not like I've got the safest lifestyle, anyways."

Rose pulls her hand away from his arm, an ugly possibility forming in her mind as the Doctor continues talking. "So, what, you decided you ought to just chuck me before you got too attached?"

The Doctor visibly flinches, and he finally — finally — turns to look at her.

"That's just it, Rose," he says, and it sounds desperate, like a plea or a prayer. He looks desperate, too, and his voice breaks a little when he continues. "It's far too late for that."

His eyes are shining in the soft green light, and sometime in the last minute or so both of them have moved even closer to each other — shoulders pressed together where she's sure they weren't before, forearms brushing where they're resting next to one another on the railing. The Doctor's face is right there, closer to hers than it's ever been before, and he is looking at her with an expression that is all earnestness and fear and something she knows the name of but is too afraid to say.

For one brief, pulse-pounding moment, Rose is certain that he is going to kiss her.

"Doctor, what are you doing down he—"

Amy's voice, floating down from one of the upper catwalks, might as well be a cattle prod for the way that it shocks the two of them apart. Rose and the Doctor jerk away from each other, putting as much distance between them as possible with abrupt, jerky movements.

Rose looks up to see Amy, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a datapad in the other, looking very tired and profoundly uncomfortable. "Sorry," Amy says, making a vague motion with her datapad in the direction she'd come from. "I'll just, um—"

The Doctor makes an awkward shuffling movement next to her before mumbling "I'll — we'll — later, all right?" and promptly fleeing out into the corridor.

Amy, meeting Rose's eyes from her spot up on the catwalk, gives her a deeply apologetic look, and mouths a very genuine sorry.

Rose just gives her a tight smile before turning to head into the corridor and back to her quarters.

There's less than four hours until duty, after all. With luck, maybe she can manage a little bit of sleep.