The next time Rose opened her eyes, the room was in complete darkness but for the amber glow coming from the fireplace. Ignoring the trance-inducing softness of her fresh new nightgown and the bed linen caressing her skin, her restless conscious mind immediately started to ask her questions. How could it be night time already? And seeing that it unquestionably was, then how long had she been sleeping? The permanent state of confusion she had lived in during her imprisonment in the Tower of London had not even let her drowse for the past four weeks. Hence, her days in the Tower had been nothing if not long, and her nights full of inconceivable and outlandish questions that seemed to escape all logic! Something resembling peace of mind only had seemed to come after having had that balmy and longed-for bath in the morning, and when sleep eventually took over her wearied body and her drained mind, Rose simply giave in. Had not been for the fact that Clara had insisted she should absolutely eat some of the fruit on the brimming tray a servant brought in before she went back to bed, she would probably have gone to sleep much earlier.
As the image of Clara sitting on the armchair next to her bed got pictured in her mind, Rose wondered whether she would still be there with her. Knowing that there was only one way to find out, she sat up and turned to the opposite side of the bed. Much to her surprise, Clara was not in the room anymore. However, her place on the armchair had been taken. Rose could not see who had actually taken it, but she could definitely see a male silhouette. The light of the fire was twinkling right behind his head, making him look like some ancient deity, but also turning him into nothing more than a sinister dark shadow. Be that as it may, since the moonlight entering from a window on the other side of the room was beaming directly on his long thin legs, she immediately recognised the blue-pinstriped pattern embedded in the fabric of his brown trousers.
So soundly had Rose been sleeping all day that she hadn't noticed the Doctor had been sitting on that armchair since noon.
Earlier that day, when he first entered that room, he found Clara sitting on the windowsill, facing the bed. She immediately turned around when the door suddenly burst open, and upon seeing him coming in, she gave a loud sigh of relief.
"Oh Doctor," she had whispered, getting up from her seat and tiptoeing towards him, "am I not happy to see you!"
The Doctor smiled softly, and as soon as he did, his eyes darted from Clara to the human figure lying in bed with her back turned on them. He didn't say a single word, but Clara could read on his face how worried he had gotten at all once, so she spoke again to calm him down.
"You don't need to worry about her, she'll be alright," she murmured. "She just needs some rest and some food. In fact, Doctor, seeing that you're now here, why don't you stay in for a minute while I go to the kitchen and bring up some soup? You can use the sonic to heat it up when she wakes up, right? The Doctor – the other Doctor – he took my jar of wine back at the Cheshire Cheese and then he…"
The Doctor didn't let her finish. All of a sudden, he wrapped his arms around her and drew her close to his chest. Both he and Clara remained silent for a moment – as far as Clara was concerned, because she knew really very well that on this occasion talking was not necessary, and as far as the Doctor was concerned, because he was carefully trying to choose the right words to say to the woman who had contributed more than anyone else to saving Rose Tyler's life that morning.
"Thank you, Clara," he finally whispered, "thank you for not giving up on her. If you hadn't tried so hard to get back to the Tower in order to save her, oh, I don't even want to think about what would've happened to her!"
"You did your share to save her too, Doctor," she said, smiling softly.
"I just did what I had to do," he murmured.
"That's what you've always done, isn't it?" she asked him, pulling away a little. "That's what you must always do, Doctor."
When Rose unconsciously moaned upon rolling in her bed, the Doctor immediately let go of Clara and dashed to her side. For the first time since he had entered that room, her face was visible to him, so he set his thunderstruck eyes on her. Once he had done so, the words his future self had said earlier that morning came back to him like the tide comes to the shore, loud and powerful, and when the tide finally washed away, the fortuitous outcome of the accident bow-tied him had caused by seeking his help after being threatened by Elizabeth I became obvious in a trice.
That, he had finally come to understand, was to admittedly be his last chance to hold her hand, and to say goodbye, and to tell her how much he loved her. He had to leverage these few borrowed hours to say and do all the things he had never said or done to Rose Tyler.
The Doctor remembered trying to exhale, but the lump in his throat had refused to let the air from his lungs reach his mouth. Taking Rose in, he sauntered towards the armchair and took a seat, and that was the way he remained for hours and hours. He never noticed when Clara sneaked out of the room, or how absolutely no one else dared come in thereafter. And yet, he didn't move from that chair at all. He simply stayed there as he watched Rose sleep, or musing over the rhythmic intervals of her breathing, or taking delight in the shades that the shifting rays of sunlight were casting on her shape. And then, when the sun finally set, he feasted his brown eyes in the way the orange glow coming from the fireplace kept dancing on the white skin of her face.
Now that Rose was finally awake and looking back at him, the Doctor's hearts were bubbling over with such joy that he thought he might just die and never regenerate again.
Letting his elbows rest on his knees as he clasped his hands, he leaned forward closer to her, and when the same moonlight that had made it possible for her to recognise part of his clothing shone down directly on his face, Rose almost skipped a heartbeat when she noticed his eyes were sparkling with tears from the very second they looked into hers.
"Hello Rose," he almost whispered.
"'Ello Doctor," she said softly as she sat up straight. "Sorry about the smack."
"Oh, don't worry about that," he said smiling. "Every cloud has a silver lining... In fact, that smack helped me rule out the thought that you might've been an impostor! No one could've smacked me like that unless Jackie Tyler were their mother."
Rose's eyes widened in surprise when the Doctor mentioned her mother's name. If she was to believe this man to really be a friend of hers, a reference to the power underlying a slap given by the one and only Jackie Tyler definitely was a very good place to start.
"You're not an impostor either, right?" she asked him. "'Cause last time we met ya sort of were one."
In his mind, the Doctor pictured the moment when a Zygon had taken his form to get to Rose and kidnap her. Ironically enough, he had been there all along, hiding in a street corner from where he had seen her getting back home at midnight on New Year's Day 2005. When he moaned in pain, she turned back and talked to him. She had been worried about him at first, but the moment she wished him a happy new year, her smile became so full of light that, for as long as she kept smiling, all the pain was gone. She turned around to check on him one last time upon closing her door, by which time, his tears had joined the rest of him in his goodbye.
And all the while, a Zygon had been lurking, waiting for him to be gone so that he could lay its fingers on her. He had been there and not noticed, and so, he hadn't been able to do nothing to stop it.
"I'm really sorry you've had to go through all this because of me, Rose," he told her. "That thing should never have brought you here."
"And ya weren't supposed to bring Anne Boleyn 'ere but ya did, didn't ya? Guess ya guys are even then," she said, the smile on her lips even wider than before. "What's happened to that long brown coat of yours?"
"Oh, good question… I think it must've burnt! Who told you about Anne Boleyn?" he asked in astonishment.
"Clara did," she answered. "She also told me you're an alien and a time traveller."
"She was right – I am," he said. "An alien and a time traveller."
"And what am I to you?" she asked expectantly.
The Doctor stayed silent for a moment. How could he possibly answer that question? Should he tell her the whole truth? It didn't matter how clever or open-minded she had already proved to be – this version of Rose Tyler still had not really met him. How could he possibly tell her she had been everything to him? That he had thought he would die the day a parallel universe stole her away? That he had actually wanted to die the day he had truly believed he had no choice but to leave her trapped there again, only that this time it would be forever?
How could he tell her that, earlier that day, if for some unexplainable reason he had happened to get to Anne Boleyn too late, he would gladly have given his own life to save hers?
"Well," he eventually started, clearing his voice, "not sure this is what you want to hear, but once you said you were my lucky pants."
"No I didn't!" she exclaimed, blushing.
"Yes you did!" he teased her, his eyes widening as he nodded. "Right after we left ancient Rome!"
"We've been to ancient Rome?" Rose asked him, her beautiful eyes narrowing in disbelief.
"Oh yes!" the Doctor answered, grinning as he jumped out of the armchair and sat cross-legged on the floor right in front of her side of the bed. "To cut a long story short, I'd been turned into stone but you managed to bring me back from the stony. Oh, that was really clever… You were brilliant! Mind you, I think it's interesting to point out that you'd also been turned into stone and that I'd brought you back to life first. Thing is, while all that was going on, I popped by the Renaissance and made a statue of you with a little help from Michelangelo. I called it Fortuna 'cause, to be honest, you've always brought me luck, and when I told you, you came up with that!"
Rose gaped at him seemingly incredulously, but soon she realised that, in spite of how incredible that story might have sounded, she believed him. She truly believed him. Maybe it was because of the way he had seemed to be overcome by his own tale, or maybe just because of the sparkle she had seen in his eyes al the while.
They were beautiful by the way, those warm brown eyes, or at least they looked so in the cold white moonlight.
So did his smile.
"Clara said Elizabeth I wanted to kill me 'cause she wanted to 'urt ya," she told him.
"Wish I could tell you she was lying when she told you that, but I'm afraid she wasn't," the Doctor told her.
"Guess we must be really good friends then if they brought me here just to piss ya off…," she said.
"Not really, no. We're not good friends," said the Doctor, shaking his head as he smiled imperceptibly. Rose frowned in shock because that was not the answer she had been expecting to hear, but before she could tell him so, the Doctor went on. "We're so much more than that, Rose Tyler."
That was more like it, she thought. That was the only answer that made any sense in the middle of all that nonsense, even if it inevitably opened a whole new set of questions.
"And what are we, Doctor?" Rose asked him without hesitation as her eyes narrowed.
"The last time someone asked that question," said the Doctor, who had finally decided what the best place to start was, "I said we're what legends are made of."
Rose kept staring at him in silence, and the Doctor watched as she pushed the bed covers aside and nimbly slid to the floor, where she sat on her legs right next to him. None of them said a single word. The Doctor was too busy trying to stop his arms from enveloping her, and Rose was busy wondering why, despite the fact that this man was an alien to her in every possible sense of the word, she was feeling so inevitably drawn to him.
"The first time we ever met," the Doctor eventually said, "or at least the first time we met properly, you were running away from some shop window dummies that were trying to kill you."
"Shop window dummies?" she asked, snorting.
"Oh yes!" answered the Doctor. "They were chasing you in the basement of that shop you used to work in, and when I found th…"
"Wait a minute!" she interrupted. "Ya just said 'a shop I used to work in'? Ya mean I don't work in that stupid shop anymore?"
"Of course you don't!" the Doctor answered. "Or soon you won't, more like! Anyway, when I found those dummies were chasing you, I took you out of there and made sure you were safe. As luck would have it, we met again the next day and joined forces against them. Then you turned out to be really clever and great help, so I invited you to come travelling with me and you accepted. Did I mention I blew the shop off, by the way?"
"So ya just asked me to go with ya and I said yes? Was that it?" she asked.
"Well, not exactly…," said the Doctor. "You actually refused at first, but then when I mentioned that my ship could travel in time you made your mind up pretty fast! Oh, the look on Mickey's face… You should've seen him. He looked quite ridiculous!"
"Oi!" she protested. "Don't say that! Mickey's a great guy!"
"Of course he's a great guy!" said the Doctor. "You think I don't know that? We may have had our differences at first, but these days, oh I just love him! Saw him a couple of days ago by the way and there he was, happily fighting aliens in the company of his wife!"
"What?" Rose asked in surprise as her eyes widened. "Ya mean Mickey and I get married? Like, in the future?"
It was curious, the Doctor thought, that the notion of Mickey Smith spending his future days fighting aliens had not sounded preposterous to Rose's ears at all, and yet the idea of her marrying him had turned out to be something she had absolutely not expected to hear.
"Well, I'm not so sure about you, but he definitely does," the Doctor told her. "To Martha."
"Who's Martha?" Rose asked after the Doctor dropped the bombshell.
"Martha Jones," he said, wondering why he had not stopped to reconsider before telling her so much. "She used to travel with me."
Rose was rooted to the spot.
"Oh, that's nice of 'im," she finally said, visibly cross. "Blimey, so 'e visits one day, I introduce 'er and then 'e leaves me for her!"
"Well, actually, it wasn't like that," said the Doctor. "Not even remotely."
"Then how was it?" she asked with a frown.
"You'd sort of left him first," answered the Doctor.
"Oh," she said, and for the first time since her cross-examination had started, she didn't look the tiniest bit surprised. "And why did I leave 'im?"
That was the moment when an unexpected voice came uninvited from behind the bedroom door – and it was a singing one.
Oui, c'est elle,
C'est la déesse,
Plus charmante et plus belle!
Oh, this is so not happening, the Doctor thought, and turning to the door, he shouted.
"Oh for goodness' sake, Jack! Step away from that door, will you?" he said in an attempt to make the singing stop which ended up proving quite effective.
"Just trying to lend you a hand there, Doc!" Jack answered.
"Who's that?" Rose asked the moment Jack's footsteps as he turned around and walked away became audible from the interior of the room.
"Captain Jack Harkness," the Doctor told her. "Haven't you met him yet?"
"No I 'aven't," she answered.
"Thanks goodness," the Doctor murmured, raising his eyebrows as he sighed with relief.
"That was French, right?" Rose asked him.
This time it was the Doctor who remained pensive and silent. The last time he had seen the TARDIS, it had been parked at the end of a corridor only a floor below, so how come it had not translated that song for her?
The treacherous moonlight revealed that the French singing had made the Doctor blush, and Rose felt extremely relieved and thankful that there was a fireplace in that room. As it happened, she had also blushed the moment the obvious answer to the question 'why had she left Mickey' revealed itself to her. The only straw she could clutch to in her hope that the Time Lord from Gallifrey had not noticed was the thought that the reddish orange gleam of the flames had been ceaselessly reflecting upon her face.
"Doctor, can we open the window? S'really 'ot in 'ere!" she said, then blushed again even more intensely. If that had been an attempt to break the coy silence, the words she had chosen to do it had been the worst possible ones.
"Yep! Excellent idea!" answered the Doctor, jumping on his feet and motioning towards the window. He could also feel the heat as much as Rose herself did, and for exactly the same reasons.
Rose smiled timidly. From her place on the carpeted floor, she had the chance to take a proper look at him for the first time since she had woken up and found him in her room. He was really very tall, really very slim, and he moved with great dexterity as he drew the curtains aside and kneeled on the windowsill, then grabbed and turned the knob and eventually opened the window.
"Thanks," said Rose, her eyes fixed on him as he looked out of the window for a moment and breathed the fresh air coming from outside. "I've spent the last month locked up in a closed room and I really need that window to be open!"
"Such a lovely night," he said as he turned his face to her and a big smile appeared on his face. Then he turned around and scanned the room, obviously looking for something, but what it might have been, Rose couldn't tell at all.
The Doctor's eyes suddenly stopped searching. Having found what they had so eagerly been looking for, he strode to a chaise longue in front of the fireplace, and stretching an arm, took a cushion from it. Rose thought he must have been feeling uncomfortable while he was sitting on the floor, but when he silently sauntered towards her, he crouched down and offered the cushion to her, his eyes never looking away from her as she took it and placed it underneath her. Rose then thought the Doctor would sit on the armchair again, but he didn't. He turned around once more and walked towards a small table beside the room door. Rose couldn't see what he was doing, but she could hear the sound of a liquid as it was being poured from one container to another. When the Doctor turned around and moved in her direction once again, she saw he was carrying a jar in his hand, and sitting in front of her, he offered it to her as well.
"I reckon you could use some water too," he said, tenderly looking at her.
"Thanks," she said as her lips curled up into a soft smile.
"Better?" he asked softly after she took a long sip.
"Yeah, thanks."
Despite their previous blushes and coyness, for a while they did nothing but stare and smile softly at each other.
"Why did the Queen want to 'urt you?" Rose eventually asked.
"Well, it's hard to explain," the Doctor told her. "I think she was just trying to prove a point."
"And what was it?" Rose asked.
"That no one should ever mess with her, I guess," answered the Doctor.
"She must be really thankful now that you've brought 'er mother back," said Rose.
"Oh yes she is, though I'm afraid things aren't going to be easy for any of them," he told her. "Anne Boleyn's been through a lot lately – false accusations, the rejection from a husband who wouldn't hesitate and send her to the scaffold just to get rid of her and marry another woman, the executions of her brother and some of their best friends, and then her own imprisonment in the Tower and an imminent death sentence… And now, out of the blue, she's been brought here, over sixty years into the future, and reunited with a daughter she can't even recognise, 'cause the last time she saw her, maybe only a couple of weeks ago, she wasn't even three years old, and now, as if by magic, she's turned into someone who's twice her own age… Sounds like an awful lot to deal with, doesn't it?"
"So much for culture shock…," said Rose with a frown.
"As for Queen Elizabeth herself," the Doctor went on, "she was so young when she lost her mother she can't really remember much about her. And even if she did, Anne Boleyn has been nothing more than an adulterous and a traitor for decades to everybody else, so Elizabeth's spent nearly all her life trying to prove to everyone around her she was Henry VIII's daughter and no one else's, pretending that her own mother had never even existed…"
"Is there anything we can do to 'elp 'em, Doctor?" Rose asked him.
The Doctor froze instantly. It was just for a moment, but it felt like ages to a really worried and clueless Rose.
"There," he finally said, smiling softly. "There you are, Rose Tyler."
"What?" Rose asked, gaping. "What is it? What did I say?"
"You wanted to know what you are to me, didn't you?" he told her. "Well, that was it. That was exactly who you are. From the moment we first met, you've been the girl who will always do her utmost to help others, no matter how mean they may have been to her first. You're the girl who can never find a reason to hate anyone."
"I pretty much hated you when I smacked you this morning, Doctor," she said, reaching for her upper teeth with the tip of her tongue as she smiled again.
"Still," said the Doctor, "something's telling me now you don't hate me anymore, do you?"
"No," said Rose, suddenly putting a hand on his and squeezing it gently while, inside his chest, the Doctor's hearts started to jump because of the way she was looking at him. "No, I don't suppose that I hate you now."
