This one took a while, but the next chapter's almost finished if that's any consolation.

"It's all fixed, by the way," the Doctor said casually as he placed Rose down on the floor just next to the TARDIS. She surveyed the large hole in the floor and the rubble below, thinking that she would not have guessed how far down it was to the basement, had she not fallen down there an hour or so earlier. "That last quake was the fissure closing. I did some tests while I was charging that thing," – he nodded towards the device that had dissolved the concrete and gotten them out, which was still lying abandoned on the basement floor – "there shouldn't be any more tremors."

"Good to know," said Jack, looking down into the hole in the floor. "Now all I've got to do is sort this out. Care to help?"

Rose shook her head. "No way." She glanced at the Doctor. "You could always come with us for a bit if you want, Jack. Let someone else sort this out."

Now it was Jack's turn to shake his head. "Thanks but no thanks. I'm good here for the moment. And besides, it seems like you two would prefer to be alone together. Don't want me getting in the way." He gave the Doctor a significant look, and the Time Lord met his gaze for a second before looking away hurriedly.

They said their goodbyes, the Doctor disappearing into the TARDIS and leaving Rose to give Jack an enormous hug and say a proper goodbye. She turned and waved at him from the doorway before going in. She felt a pang at him not coming into the TARDIS with them, but he had been right about her and the Doctor being alone together. A couple of seconds after she had stepped inside, she had a Jenny wrapped around her leg – thankfully it was her uninjured one.

"Wose!"

"Hey you!" Rose said, leaning down to pick her up and give her a hug. "Oh I missed you down there."

Jenny hugged her back clumsily, little arms wrapping tightly around her neck. Rose caught sight of the Doctor looking at her from where he leant against the console, and suddenly felt very awkward. Her delight at seeing him again had made her temporarily forget the events of the past few days.

"You OK?" she asked him tentatively.

The Doctor nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm OK." He gave her a small smile, the sort that showed her much more of his underlying emotional state than any of his big, beaming grins ever could. She hoped he understood that she had needed to talk things through, and that Jack always gave the best advice. The Doctor had that enormous brain; surely he could work out her motivations without feeling jealous or hurt.

Whatever he was feeling, Rose decided that she couldn't deal with talking to him about it all now. She would have a relax and then probably get some sleep, and talk to him about it another day.

"I might have a sit down in the library," she said to the Doctor over Jenny's shoulder, "join me?"

He nodded, almost turning towards the console before looking back at her. He stepped swiftly over and enfolded Rose in his arms, wrapping her and Jenny up in a close embrace. They stood still for a moment, Rose enjoying the warmth and comfort the Doctor provided. Then next to her ear, she heard him say: "Of course – but you might want me to look at that ankle first."

Rose sighed, suddenly remembering that she was injured. The memory of the incident returned, along with the pain, and she gasped and took the weight off of her ankle."I forgot," she said quietly.

"Thought so." The Doctor finally released her, to her disappointment, stroking Jenny's hair as she continued to snuggle into Rose's shoulder. "Think you can make it to the medical room? Or do you need me to impress you with my muscles as I carry you there without even trying?" He was grinning widely now.

"You're not that impressive," Rose said, as seriously as she could without laughing.

He pouted for a moment but let it go, taking Jenny from her and offering her his arm. "Well then, at least I can escort you there."

She grinned and looped her arm through his. "Why thank you, Sir Doctor."

"My pleasure, Dame Rose," he said with what Rose would have definitely called a giggle. Jenny made a burbling noise of displeasure and the Doctor bounced her, peering into her scowling face. "Alright then, you can be a Baron or something. Lord Jenny, how does that sound?" She continued to frown, turning her face away from him. "She's tired," the Doctor explained, leading Rose slowly down the corridor as she limped forward, determined not to give in and let him carry her. Her ankle was hurting a lot more than she had anticipated. "She could barely stop moving all the time you were stuck down there, and she would have needed a nap at about this point anyway. You wait, she'll be out like a light any second now."

The Doctor healed Rose's ankle – "Almost broken but not quite – jeopardy friendly indeed." – and most of her larger cuts and bruises. Rose couldn't be bothered to let him fix up every single one of her injuries, and fidgeted throughout the process before impatiently grabbing the Doctor's hand and dragging him out of the medical room.

Now they sat side by side on one of the comfy leather sofas in the library. Jenny was lying on the armchair opposite them,fast asleep and drooling onto the leather cushion beneath her.

Warm and contented, so much so that even the pain of the past few days and the things left unsaid by her and the Doctor did not seem important, Rose leaned against the Doctor's shoulder and felt her entire body relaxing into the cushions. One thing, however, remained on her mind, and as she contemplated their clasped hands she decided just to ask him about it. She was sick of neither of them ever saying what they wanted.

"Doctor, can I ask you something?"

"Mm-hmm?" he replied distractedly.

"Before – ages ago, really – when we met Sarah-Jane that time... why did you bring Mickey with us?"

That caught his attention. He looked up at her, a frown on his face. "What do you mean?"

Rose shrugged. "Dunno, just thinking – it was something that Jack said, 'bout us being on our own together. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm glad Mickey was here in the long run, but do you remember when we were in the console room and he asked to come with us?" The Doctor nodded slowly, and Rose could see realisation growing in his eyes as he began to understand where she was headed. "Well I mouthed "no" to you, and I know you saw me do it, but you invited him on board anyway. I'm not saying you should do everything I want you to, but I just wondered why, that's all."

He furrowed his brow in thought for a few seconds before he answered. "There were a few different reasons for it. D'you want the list?"

"Yes please," Rose said, sitting sideways on the settee and crossing her legs – her ankle had ceased hurting a few minutes ago thanks to the Doctor's treatment - so she could look at him properly as he talked. He turned to face her too, one leg bent in front of him and his arm resting on the back of the sofa.

"Reason one – and I know it sounds obvious – but he wanted to come and I thought he deserved it. I asked him to once before, did he ever tell you that?" Rose was shocked.

"No, no he didn't."

The Doctor smiled. "I thought not. I was right after we got rid of those Slitheen, the first time, and you were just getting your things. I was talking to him outside the TARDIS, and I offered him the chance to come. Well, he had saved the world, it only seemed fair. But he didn't want to. Said he couldn't deal with it, and he asked me not to tell you." Rose raised an eyebrow, and the Doctor grinned sheepishly. "Well, I figured he's proven himself capable enough of dealing with it now, so he wouldn't mind you knowing. But anyway, when he asked that time, I just thought that I owed it to him, really. I am capable of being nice to people, you know."

"Fair enough. That sounds just about plausible. What about your other reasons?"

There was a longer pause this time, as though he were trying to work out how to phrase what he wanted to say correctly.

"Part of me thought that you could use a friend on the TARDIS sometimes – you know, someone who wasn't me." Rose rolled her eyes. "Yeah, thought that would be your reaction to that one. Still, that was only a tiny bit of it. The rest of it was... I think I wanted someone there to get between us a bit."

Rose knew her expression was hurt, but she couldn't hide her feelings from him any more. "What the actual hell?" she blurted out, any knowledge of English grammar going out the window. "And here I was, worried that I was selfish for thinking that Mickey would get between us if he came on board, which he didn't really, when all the time that was your intention?"

"If I might be allowed to explain myself?" the Doctor ventured. Rose looked at him with narrowed eyes, before finally pursing her lips and nodding. "Thankyou. Now I need to ask you if you remember that day. Well, the night before. D'you remember the conversation we had in the street before that Krillitane swooped down on us."

"Of course," Rose said, "where you told me that I could spend the rest of my life with you, but you couldn't spend yours with me, that humans wither and die, all that jazz."

"Precisely." He tried a smile, but Rose wasn't ready for that yet. "Well, after that, and after talking to Sarah-Jane about what had happened to her, I could see how much pain I was causing you – how much I would cause you. So I thought that if Mickey were there, to sort of make it less intense between us, then it might make it easier for you not to feel sad that we couldn't have what everyone else does. And when you mouthed "no" at me, it only made me more sure that it shouldn't be just us two. The closer we got, the worse it was going to be in the end." He ran a hand through his hair, not quite meeting her eyes as he continued to the end of his explanation. "And of course it didn't work. Sure, he was there, but any closeness that evaporated between us was entirely my doing." He hung his head, and Rose knew immediately what it was he was referring to. "But anyway, after that time in the parallel world when Mickey left, I realised that there was no point in trying to delay the inevitable. I thought I was going to lose you that day - that you were going to choose to stay in that world, with Mickey and your dad. I knew it wasn't going to happen, not really, but it still scared me. And I realised that us being happy together was more important than the pain that would actually come at the end."

Here he paused – it wasn't a subject that either of them ever liked to bring up, the fact that Rose was going to die while the Doctor wouldn't even age.

"It did change after that," Rose remembered, "I thought it was just cause Mickey had left, but it wasn't, was it?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Nope. It was me just wanting to be happy for once, without worrying about what's going to follow."

Nodding, Rose let her focus drift as she thought about what the Doctor had just told her. He had been trying to minimise the heartbreak that was going to occur in the end. Well, it certainly hadn't worked. But it was so much deeper and more heartfelt than him simply wanting to push them apart, and she found she could not remain angry with him when she realised that he had been just and hurt and conflicted and confused as she had, without her even knowing it.

"Wow," Rose said finally, "and here I was thinking you were just going to say you thought it would be funny to watch Mickey blundering about in deep space."

The Doctor laughed. "That could have been a reason, but it wasn't. I thought it would be better – you know, for whatever reason – but I managed to make a mess out of things all by myself without Mickey giving me any help at all."

Rose looked down at her left knee, her hands gripping tightly onto her feet. There, cross-legged on the settee with a few inches between her and the Doctor, she could remember so clearly the betrayal she had felt during that first trip after they picked up Mickey. Despite all of the terrible, traumatising things that had happened to Rose since she met the Doctor, the period after that little adventure was one of the ones she liked to remember least. The tension in the TARDIS could have been cut with a knife, and sometimes Rose wanted to use a knife on the Doctor when she thought about how stupid he had been. The only thing that saved them was the Doctor's realisation of his own idiocy and selfishness.

They had managed to build up trust again, slowly but surely. Mickey acted as a bit of a bridge between them for a while, but before he left them to live in Pete's World everything was back to how it had always been between them. It helped Rose now to know that what had happened on that spaceship and in France was at least partly to do with him trying to put distance between himself and Rose, just as he had done when bringing Mickey on board.

Still, she didn't really want to relive any of that.

"S'okay," she said finally, "you mess things up a lot, but you always try to put them right." That comment came off rather more pointed that she had meant it to, and she hoped the Doctor didn't think she was trying to force him into a discussion about what they were going to do about their relationship (or lack thereof).

"Do I?" He sounded so utterly dejected that Rose risked a peek at him. He was staring at a point just over her left shoulder, not really focussing on anything. He appeared to come back to himself as she watched, looking into her eyes. "Rose, I need to-"

"No," Rose said firmly, watching his eyebrows crinkle in confusion. "I mean, not now." She leaned across and embraced him, snuggling into his side as best she could. "We can talk about it tomorrow – this is all I want right now." She wrapped her arms tighter around him and hummed in contentment to illustrate her point.

He made an indistinguishable grunt of disapproval. "Alright then, but you can't blame me for trying to wriggle out of meaningful discussion this time – this one is entirely your fault."

"Deal," she agreed, delighted at the fact that that he was now stroking her hair. Rose leaned up and pressed a light kiss to his jaw. She would never, ever get used to being like this with the Doctor. Not if she lived to be a thousand years old.

"Wanna go out again after Jenny's had her nap?" the Doctor asked casually after a few minutes. "I'm sure there are a few places in this big old universe we haven't found yet."

Rose twisted her ankle around, testing it for pain. A slight ache was the only indication there had been anything wrong with it. One look into the Doctor's eyes, sparkling with anticipation and the thrill of a new adventure, and all of the tiredness in Rose's limbs seemed to melt away.

"Sounds good."