This one's slightly shorter, but there's a very long one between Jack and Rose coming up, so do not fret.
The Doctor felt absolutely wrung out. A night of tinkering on the TARDIS with Rose's words rolling around inside his brain had not been very good for his mental wellbeing. He possibly could have used the time more constructively, maybe actually decided what he was going to say to Rose rather than moping around and stressing himself out about it. Once the TARDIS had informed him that Rose was awake, he strolled along the corridor to her room. The last time he had talked to her, she had been utterly cold and unreachable due to the argument they had just had, and although he had been utterly furious at the time, that anger had ebbed away faster than he would have believed possible.
And then, of course, there had been the conversation between Rose and Jenny last night. Well, conversation was probably a bit of a strong word for it, considering the fact that Jenny had said about three words, but what Rose had said to her had been enlightening to say the least. His emotions had taken over a bit at that point, and he scrubbed at his eyes as he made his way to Rose's room, despite logic telling him that, after 6 or so hours, there couldn't be any traces of the fact that he had been crying left on his face.
He had not cried in a long time, and he didn't want to remind Rose of the last time she might have seen him with tears in his eyes – he still had nightmares about it sometimes, in the rare moments when he slept. Rose's face contorted with grief and his own tears threatening to fall and the fact that he could not even reach out and touch her.
The Doctor managed to make some normal conversation, even if Rose was still distant with him. He did deserve it, he knew, and he was glad that Jenny had gone to see her last night, even if it had caused him a moment of panic when he checked on her and realised that she wasn't there. Rose had received some comfort while she felt so upset, though it hadn't been from him. He apologised to her, and he meant is so sincerely that the hug that followed felt as if he could finally breathe again. Having Rose back in his arms felt wondrous.
The kissing, however, was not something he had planned on doing.
They were taking things slow, like they had agreed to, and yet all of a sudden things were moving quickly to that place beyond kissing where he had so often longed to go with Rose.
When she had pulled away and asked to go and see Jack, he had felt so rejected it was as if a hole had been punched right through his stomach, leaving a load of empty space where his internal organs should have been. He didn't want to admit to himself how hard it was to be open with Rose and to let this thing with her go further, and when she had abruptly stopped what had been going on between them like that, it hurt him more than he would ever have thought.
The Doctor pushed and pulled the controls on the console with more force than was necessary, trying not to overthink things. As usual, he did nothing but overthink every word of his exchanges with Rose over the last 24 hours, getting so caught up in his thoughts that he almost didn't notice Rose's entrance into the console room. He kept his face carefully blank, not letting any emotion show in his eyes, as he normally would have when he saw her. It was difficult, and he was certain he looked cold and unfriendly, but it had to be better this way than the alternative.
They stepped out of the TARDIS into a room that Rose assumed was the Torchwood Hub, though she had never actually been there. The Torchwood in Pete's World had been located in Canary Wharf, once it had been rebuilt by Pete and Mickey, and had never been relocated to Cardiff in the first place. At first glance it seemed deserted.
"Rose!" came Jack's yell from behind them. Rose found herself scooped up in an enormous hug and lifted off her feet. She laughed at the feeling of it, and was rewarded with a chuckle from Jack, who seemed absolutely overjoyed. He was beaming, and it was only after he had given the Doctor the same treatment he had given Rose that he seemed to register the presence of someone else in the Doctor's arms.
"I take it this is Jenny, then? Martha told me," he explained in response to Rose's quizzical look.
"Yep, this is her." The Doctor held his daughter comfortably, her weight resting on his hip as she looked around curiously. "Jenny, I know you've got a lot of important things to remember, but this is Jack. He's mine and Rose's friend, so you've got to be nice to him."
"Hey Jenny," said Jack, "luckily you don't seem to have inherited any of your dad's looks from when I first met him – those ears would have looked ridiculous on you." Rose had to laugh, and the Doctor grinned as well.
"I liked those ears," Rose had to add, and the Doctor gave her a slightly amused look that seemed to indicate that this pleased him.
"D'you wanna say hi to Jack?" the Doctor asked his daughter.
"No way," said Jenny.
Rose found it very hard to regain control after that. Jenny's latest accomplishment – if it could be called that – had led her to pick up this phrase from somewhere. Rose blamed the Doctor, the Doctor blamed Rose, and the TARDIS seemed faintly amused by the whole thing. It certainly amused Rose no end to hear Jenny, on being asked any question under the sun, always replying with this same two word phrase. She even used it when she meant to say yes to something, the novelty of it was so great.
Jenny giggled and clapped her hands at the reaction she had gotten from Rose and Jack at her use of her latest addition to her vocabulary. Of course, this was why she continued to do it, but the Doctor wasn't too fussed about it. "Oh go on, Jenny, say hello to Jack," the Doctor coaxed.
"No way."
Jack raised an eyebrow. "Yes way." He plucked Jenny from the Doctor's arms and held her in front of him. She reached out her hands and grabbed his nose. "Does she always do this?"
Rose noded. "Yep. She's got this thing with noses."
"Always goes for the nose, that one," the Doctor chimed in, hands in his pockets.
Jack looked down at Jenny, who was now attempting to chew the collar of his coat (Do children always like to chew things this much? Rose wondered). "She's beautiful."
"Thankyou." The Doctor's expression was contented and soft as he regarded his little girl. Rose felt a pang inside her. After seeing him so lonely and so sad at times, the amount of love and happiness that this toddler had brought him was almost unbelievable. Rose looked at his eyes, shining with love, and recognised the look he sometimes had on his face when she caught him looking at her. There was the same tiny trace of awe in that expression, as though he couldn't quite believe he was lucky enough to be here with her. Rose bit her lip, a rush of emotion almost overcoming her. She loved him so much it almost hurt.
Jack seemed to have sensed that both Rose and the Doctor were slightly preoccupied with thoughts of something else.
"Cup of tea?" he asked them both cheerfully, blowing away the tension that had settled in the air. "I know how much you two enjoy a cup of tea."
Rose grinned at him. "Tea would be fantastic."
"Agreed," said the Doctor. Jack went over to the kitchen area and began to make the tea, bringing over two mugs when he was done and telling the Doctor and Rose about the clean-up of the aftermath of the Dalek attack last year.
In the middle of this everyday, mundane activity, the entire room shook. Rose's head snapped up, shocked, and she saw Jack looking concerned.
"I was just trying to figure this out, Doctor. Something's happening with the rift – some sort of disturbance, causing tremors. Definitely needs to be fixed before anyone starts to look into what might be causing it."
The Doctor shoved his glasses onto his face and peered at some of the read-outs on the screens around him. Rose looked over his shoulder while keeping an eye on Jenny, who was sitting on an office chair and being spun around by Jack, who was dividing his attention between the toddler and her father.
For a few minutes the Doctor punched some keys and made some calculations, while Rose told Jack about some of the places they'd been to since he had last seen them. For him it had been about a year since they had dropped him off in the TARDIS, though it seemed his year had been reasonably uneventful.
"Aha!" the Doctor cried, pointing an accusing finger at one computer screen as if to say "Gotcha!"
"What?" Rose asked. She might have been quite well versed in alien technology and dimension jumping, but whatever the Doctor was doing here was beyond her. Just trying to figure out what all the equations the Doctor had been scribbling down meant was making her head ache slightly.
"It's the rift. A tiny fissure has opened up – not enough to let anything travel through it, but enough that the sort of background radiation the rift gives off is building up and trying to get through. It's not dangerous or anything, but it's a bit of a nuisance all the same. It's sort of like a bottleneck. When the energy builds up enough to force its way out, it barges through the rift and shakes the ground, causing the tremors. It's not really shaking the ground so much as shaking the fabric of time and space, but we can overlook that. It should pull back together on its own eventually, but I think I can speed it along it you give me a tick."
He began to bound about the room, picking through the bits of equipment that were scattered around the place. "I've been looking at those tremors for a week," Jack muttered to Rose, ruefully, "he turns up and solves the problem in 30 seconds. It's enough to bruise your ego."
"Don't worry about it, he's ahead at this sort of stuff but he's painfully behind the human race when it comes to other things." Jack evidently detected the bitterness in her voice, because he looked at her curiously. However, he did not get a chance to try and press her for more information before the next tremor arrived.
The ground shook again, much more violently, the deep, groaning sound growing louder and louder. This was something different, and Rose just had time to see the Doctor snatch up Jenny from her chair and yell "Get to the TARDIS-" before there was a crunching noise and she felt herself falling backwards and down, away from the Doctor, who was looking on in terror from a piece of the floor that had not chosen that moment to cave in. Jack was next to her, and she was aware of his arms flailing as he attempted to find purchase on something as he fell, but Rose's attention was mostly focussed on the Doctor and the expression on his face. The feeling of falling away from him as he looked on in terror was all too familiar to Rose, and she found herself yelling, arms reaching out towards him as rubble and concrete struck her from all sides and her vision went black.