And was caught.

Her eyes were too blurry for her to see who was responsible for the catching, and before she was able to blink them clear she found herself pressed into a tight embrace.

'Rose,' an unfamiliar voice breathed into her ear, and without thinking too hard about it, she relaxed, something about the man and the hug reassuring, comforting. 'Rose. My Rose.'

She stiffened at that. There was only one man who was allowed to call her his and it wasn't this cockney stranger. She struggled in his arms, attempted to break free but he was clinging to her as if his life depended on it. She wrestled an arm out, reared back and swung it at his face as hard as she could.

He recoiled immediately, putting a hand to his cheek. 'Ouch,' he complained. 'You hit harder than your mother.'

She squinted, rubbed her eyes and took a good look at her would-be rescuer. He was tall and skinny, clad in a brown suit with hair so artfully coiffured he must have put real effort into it, his brown eyes the colour of runny chocolate. She'd never met him before in her life.

'How do you know my name?'

He gaped at her. 'Rose? Are you feeling alright?'

She ignored him, scanning the room quickly for a way out. It appeared to be the mirror image of the one she'd just left, all white walls and levers, except that this one didn't have a broken TARDIS in it, and no Doctor. A jagged lump caught in her throat and she forgot about the man, spinning on her heel to pat the wall behind her, searching for the doorway that had just sucked her through. Her fingers met nothing but concrete. She spread her hands, ran them over the surface more carefully, looking for a break, a seal, an edge that could be prised open.

'What's on the other side of this?' she demanded, mirroring the stranger's previous pose and putting her ear against the plaster to see if any sound might be able to travel through. There was a sound, but it wasn't quite what she was expecting.

The whine of the sonic screwdriver cut the air and she whirled, her mouth dropping open. The man was pointing it at her and it took her a few seconds to recover herself, before she ran at him, snatched the device away and thrust it behind her back. 'Where is he?' she yelled. 'What have you done with him?'

'Ah.' The man snapped his bony jaw shut. 'You're not my Rose, are you? You look like her, but,' he waved vaguely. 'Different hair. Different clothes. And when I say 'my' Rose, what I actually mean is not my Rose, obviously. There's no 'me and Rose' or anything.'

She advanced on him threateningly. 'You're not making sense. What have you done to the Doctor?'

He brightened considerably. 'Nothing. I am the Doctor.'

She hit him round the face again, as hard as she could.

He winced away, clutching at his cheek. 'Stop doing that. I am the Doctor. You're Rose Tyler. Your mother is Jackie, your dad is Pete. He's dead. Or he's in a parallel world. Which is it?'

She squinted at him. 'What's a parallel world?'

'Narrows it down,' he said. 'What's the last thing you remember before you came through void?'

'The Doctor told me he loved me.'

'Not something I would say,' he mused. 'Not now anyway. The Doctor you know, does he wear a lot of leather? Smell like petrol?'

She shrugged. 'He had a shower this morning. The smell's mostly gone.'

The thin man smiled winningly. 'That was me before I regenerated. Time Lords don't die, you see, we just change into someone else. He becomes me.' He beamed at her. 'Bigger and better in every way.'

She put her hands on her hips. 'If you're the Doctor, then where's the TARDIS?'

'Parked it downstairs. Do you want to come and check?'

'No.' Rose frowned. 'Show me the psychic paper.'

He fished it out, handed it over, and it did indeed say 'the Doctor' on it, probably for the first time ever.

She turned away. 'I have to get back. Reality's about to implode and I need to be with him when it does.'

The man in the suit snorted. 'Implode? Who told you that?'

'He did. You did. Whatever. The timeline is collapsing like a concertina and Cybermen are falling through where it touches. The whole thing is going to go boom.' She did the action. 'And it will take my Doctor with it when it does.'

The man who might be the Doctor scratched his chin. 'Did your Doctor happen to mention why this was happening?' His hand copied the movement she'd made. 'Although you realise that's an explosion, not an implosion. An implosion would be more like this.' He made some kind of complicated manoeuvre with his fingers which ended up with them curled into a ball, accompanying it with a sucking noise.

She gave him a level stare. 'Concentrate. It's happening because my Doctor used his TARDIS to create a fixed point in time so that he could come back and save me.'

'Well, that was stupid of him. What did you need saving from?'

'A French woman, apparently. Some 'brain dead idiot', I think was the expression, left me behind on a spaceship to run off with her. I tried to use emergency programme one and ended up stuck in the past.'

The brown man looked dreamy, and not in a good way. 'Ah, Reinette. Lovely girl.'

Rose drew back her arm in preparation for a third slap, and the first one that he actually deserved, but he spotted the movement and dodged away.

'And anyway, I didn't leave you. I came back.'

Rose frowned. 'You didn't. He did.'

'I mean, I came back for my Rose. She's just fallen through the void into Pete's world and I can't get her back, but now I have you instead.'

'There's another one of me somewhere? The same way there's another one of you?'

'You're from a parallel world, by the sound of it. There's probably a lot of us both, by now.' He was still maintaining a safe distance. 'Lots of different parallel worlds, all existing at the same time, and never crossing over, expect where someone does something stupid, like here, and bodges great big holes from one to the other. Things fall through. Cybermen mostly, in this case. Some Daleks. And you.'

'Just holes,' she clarified. 'Holes that things can fall through. Not great big explosions and the end of time, like he said?'

He grinned at her. 'You don't want to believe everything I tell you, you know. Even I'm wrong sometimes.'

'Are you wrong about this? You've had Cybermen and Daleks and people falling through these holes, but in my world there've only been Cybermen helmets. No Daleks or anything.'

He shrugged. 'You're further away. Smaller holes I expect. Mini holes maybe. Holettes. Oh, I like that. Holettes.'

She turned back to the wall, feeling around the base now. 'Then all I have to do is find a hole and crawl back through it, right? And we'll be together and no one will die.'

'In theory,' confirmed the man whose opinion she was now willing to trust implicitly. 'But in practice I've just shut them all down. No more cracks in time. No more travelling to parallel dimensions. This was the weak spot, the place where all the doorways were coming from and now it's closed there isn't any way back. You were the last thing to come through, I'm afraid.'

She rose to her feet, her eyes round as she stared at him in disbelief. 'But I want to go back.'

He shrugged. 'There isn't any going back. Life doesn't have a rewind button. You're supposed to be here with me, not stuck with him.'

Her eyes filmed over for a second, before she blinked them clear, the anger rising inside her. 'He came back for me. I'm not leaving him behind. You reckon you're the Doctor. What's the plan? The Doctor always has a plan.'

'Speaking as the Doctor, I can categorically say that he doesn't. I don't. What I mostly have is hope that something will turn up, it usually does. '

She threw the sonic screwdriver back to him. 'Yeah well, in this case, I'm going to turn up. Can you scan for another of those weak spots? Maybe they haven't all shut down.'

He sighed, pocketed the screwdriver instead. 'I'm sorry, but it's too late. The cracks in this world are all gone.' He stepped forward, a trifle cautiously, put a hand on each of her shoulders and rubbed them. 'But I'm still here, and we're together. I look a bit different, but I'm still the same person. I feel the same way about you that he does. You're the most important woman in the world to me.'

She shook him off. 'You left me for five and a half hours. You don't feel the same way he does.' She reached out then and cupped his cheek, ran a thumb across his skin, smiled at his confused look. 'But you are the Doctor, and that is a fantastic plan. I love you.'

His confusion deepened. 'Quite right too,' he muttered, offhand. 'What plan?'

She broke the contact, whirled, and ran for the exit. The last thing she heard was the Doctor murmuring 'Unless…'

The lift was already on the top floor so Rose jumped straight in, hammering on the buttons impatiently until it began descending. She had no idea whether or not time passed differently in different worlds and nor did she know whether a house on one side correlated with the same house on the other, but this was the only plan she had and she was going to try it, no matter what. The tube wasn't running, what with all the invasions that had been happening, but she managed to hail a black cab loitering just outside the police cordon and gave the driver directions to the residence of the actual most important woman in the world, Mickey's gran.

Only one thing apart from the Cybermen helmets had ever been out of place, and that was a living, breathing, human being who had fallen through a gran sized hole in a parallel world and ended up alive when she should be dead. Rose crossed her fingers, wished upon a star, clutched her four-leaved clover, rabbit's foot, black cat and anything else that might be lucky and just hoped that the universe would be kind enough to let her get back where she belonged.

Mickey's gran's house wasn't locked, the front door was still on the latch, but it smelt faintly of mould when she pushed her way in a few minutes later. There was a half-drunk cup of tea on the kitchen counter, cold, with a thick white skin on top and all the fruit in the bowl was soft and brown. Somewhere upstairs a radio was playing. Rose worked her way around the tiny lounge, examining the walls for shiny white patches, feeling for soft spots that might hide a way through. She drew a blank in the dining room, and then worked her way up the stairs, noting the rip in the swirling carpet and stepping carefully over it.

The avocado coloured bathroom suite and orange tiles held no gateways to another reality, and Mickey's gran's bedroom, complete with walking aid, bunch of wilted flowers and false teeth in a glass yielded no clue. The second bedroom was full of a lifetime's worth of junk, packing crates, suitcases and a huge white wedding dress in a plastic wrapper. Rose went through it all carefully, poking into every corner, waiting to feel the inexorable tug of the interdimensional time travelling wind, but her feet stayed firmly on the ground.

She snivelled a bit, wiped her nose, brushed off a traitorous tear, and sat down on the top step to consider her options. That was when she heard it. A whisper in the shadows. A rustle, a half-heard footstep. And a voice. A voice that spoke across long miles of emptiness to echo in the solitude of her heart. A voice she'd wait all her life to hear. A voice that sounded very, very bored.

It took her a while to spot it, a wrinkle in the air, a slight mismatch in the pattern of the carpet about halfway down the stairs, a shimmer, a faint glow. She must have walked straight through it on the way up. She crept slowly towards the ripple, unwilling to risk a fall, knowing that this staircase had proved fatal, once upon a time. The gap between universes was about waist height, not something that you'd step into by accident – if Rose wanted to push through it, she was going to have to jump. She assumed that Mickey's gran had been halfway through falling to her death when she'd fallen into another world instead. Rose didn't dare get too close, knowing that the holes into her own reality were small, small enough to fit only a helmet and nothing more, apart from this one. She didn't want to poke her head through and find she'd lost it.

Instead, she called his name.

'You took your time,' he complained immediately, scratchy and hoarse with distance, or possibly relief. She couldn't see him, but she could imagine the scowl on his face, the twinkle in his eyes that meant he was teasing.

She shrugged. 'How long did you wait?'

'Five and a half...' he started, then trailed off. 'Forever,' he said. 'It felt like forever.'

She pulled her arms tighter around herself. 'I can't see you.'

'I can see you, sort of. You're all flickery and faint though. And it looks like you've lost your legs.'

She stood up a bit straighter. 'Do I look like a hologram?'

'Not a very good one. The gap between worlds must be quite small. Don't step through it yet, I'll try to use the TARDIS to make it bigger.'

'This is emergency programme one,' she said.

'Hilarious. Really funny. I'm splitting my sides with laughter over here.'

'Doctor, now listen. If this programme is activated it means I'm stuck in a parallel dimension with no way back, and that's alright, at least reality isn't collapsing like a concertina and taking you with it.'

'It was premature interpretation, that's all. It can happen to anyone. I was too busy concentrating on not losing you again to think of another explanation for the energy readings. And honestly, who would have thought the most plausible explanation was a load of helmets falling through from a parallel world being invaded by Cybermen?'

'I bet you're fussing and moaning right now. Typical. But just be quiet, and listen a bit more. The TARDIS is your best friend. If I can't get back, you'll need her more than ever. I want you to make things right with her, apologise, if you have to.'

'Already done. She switched herself back on once the ruptures in reality started closing and it became obvious that our timeline wasn't going anywhere. We're parked at the bottom of the stairs, and she's helping me talk to you right now, on condition that I remove her manual override switch. This gateway only operates in one direction, I can't get through to you, I've already tried, so the TARDIS has burnt up nearly all her power supplies keeping the gap open long enough for you to get here. We've got about two minutes left.'

'And if you want to remember me, you can do one thing.'

'Look at the enormous love bite you left on my shoulder? I'm nearly up to full power. When I say so, you jump. I'll catch you.'

'Just one. Move on. I don't want you moping around feeling sorry for yourself. Get out there and save the world. Don't be on your own.'

'I love you,' he snapped, a touch of steel in his voice now. 'What do you think that means?'

She shrugged, twisting the ring around her finger.

'It means I won't move on and I won't leave you behind. It means that if you jump through that gap and you don't end up in my arms I'll come looking for you. I'll look for you for the rest of my life, and that's going to be a really long time. But if you jump through that gap and you do end up in my arms then I'll never let you out of them again. You'll need another few boxes of tissues, at the very least. Are you ready? You need to jump.'

But she hesitated. If she jumped off the top step and ended up dead, like Mickey's gran, not even the Doctor would be able to find her. And like the other Doctor had said, there were probably hundreds of parallel worlds out there, and no guarantee she'd end up in the right one.

'Rose,' he said, threads of tenderness woven through his tone. 'I know you're scared, but you have to hope it will be alright. No one can live without hope. And you know who taught me that? You did. That first day we met. You held my hand and I realised that life could get better again, as long as I held on to hope. You're my hope. Jump.'

She took a deep breath, stepped back a few paces.

His voice drifted out of the empty space between worlds. 'Remember that I love you.'

'I remember,' she answered, and jumped.

The End.

My romance novels, The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer are available now on Amazon, and you can always contact me on sallyannepalmerauthor at outlook dot com