Title: After Dark
Rating: T
Spoilers: Anything up to and including 'The Unquiet Dead'
Set: Between 'The Unquiet Dead' and 'The Aliens of London'
Parings: Hinting at 9thDoctor/Rose growing feelings
Warnings: Mildly sexual situations. Nothing your mother wouldn't want you watching.


Rose smiled softly as the sound of a loud bang intruded through the open door into her room. Then she laughed to herself as this was swiftly followed by a stream of angry words, spoken in a language she didn't understand but which sounded very odd when said in a northern accent. By the sound of it his latest attempt to fix the increasingly temperamental TARDIS hadn't been anymore of a success than previous half dozen. Apparently the 'space' part of the equation was working well enough, as he'd proved when teleporting them all over the British Isles whilst running some tests. The 'time' aspect wasn't running quite so smoothly however. At the moment he could only get forwards working but not backwards. And, as he pointed out, there was only so far you could go in one direction.

He'd be trying to fix it for just over two days now - the longest amount of time they'd stayed in one place since she'd met him. A few hours ago he'd rushed in to see her, excitedly claming that that he'd accidentally configured the thing to freeze time instead of travel through it. Which was apparently a major break through in temporal theory. He'd been rather disappointed when she'd pointed out that actually his watch had stopped.

She hadn't seen him since then, but she wasn't particularly concerned. He'd fix it eventually. He always did. And then the frustration of the last few days would be gone and he'd be grinning like an idiot at her, asking where she wanted to go next.

Besides, it felt good to have a little break. She'd managed to persuade him to drop her off in London yesterday so she could pop in and see her mum. That had been weird. As far as she was concerned Rose had been staying at a friend's house for a couple of days, her occasional phone calls home preventing her from questioning that at all. In reality it had been weeks since she'd last seen her.

Her mum kept going on about how different she seemed, not that Rose herself had noticed anything. But, she supposed, if travelling through time and space didn't change you slightly, what would?

Mum had had to go to work, despite Rose's suggestion that she take the day off and they go shopping. She would have liked to have tried a bit harder to convince her, not entirely sure when she'd get to see her again. But last thing Rose wanted to do was make her suspicious that anything was wrong. She'd never hear the end of it. So she stood at the door of their flat and waved her mum off, wondering what else she would see and have to hide from her before they met again.

It only took her a short while to come to the conclusion that sitting around watching 'This Morning' wasn't exactly the most productive thing she could be doing. Despite what Louis Armstrong would have you believe, no one had all the time in the world. It had taken her being witness to the end of the world to make her realise that. And whilst the pre-Doctor Rose would have been perfectly content to slouch around on the sofa all morning, this Rose was itching to do something. Maybe her mum was right - she had changed.

Even though she knew it was 5 billion years in the future, she couldn't help but feel that there was somehow not enough time left. That the days of cars, nightclubs, CDs and McDonalds were too few. It had given her a kind of sad appreciation for what was around her. You always looked at something a little more fondly when you no longer took it for granted.

So she had decided that she would take that walk around the shops on her own. She hoped it would help her to put things into perspective, even if it was weird to walk amongst 'normal' people, knowing things they couldn't possibly know. The idea suddenly made her feel very alone. Isolated. Like she was some kind of outcast because she had cheated and seen what was to come. It brought on a sudden longing for the Doctor to show up - at least she didn't have to lie around him.

She had briefly considered calling Mickey, thinking that she should really try to explain to him what had happened and that things were fine, but she had quickly dismissed that idea. What on earth would she say?

'You alright?'

'How you been since the bin ate you?'

'I know I disappeared with a strange bloke, but it's alright cos he's a friendly alien'.

'Sorry'.

She supposed they were finished anyway. After all, when you ran off with a strange man and disappeared into the night with him without a second thought, it's probably a good sign that the relationship with your boyfriend wasn't going anywhere. It saddened her little that she wasn't more bothered about it. They had been together nearly a year. And he was a decent bloke, something most girls would kill for.

Yes, she missed Mickey. But just not enough.

And she would have been an idiot not to take up the Doctor's offer. When she had first turned him down she had been thinking about the other people in her life and what was best for them. It was only as the blue police box had faded away that she'd realised that it wasn't what was best for her. Most people would have given their right arm for such an opportunity. She would have regretted it for the rest of her life if he hadn't come back.

She was lucky he did and now she knew she had to make the best of it. Which was something that had been playing on her mind in the last couple of days of inactivity.

As Rose wandered around the shops - browsing in windows, looking at clothes she couldn't afford - she pondered the matter a little more. Whilst she wouldn't consider herself stupid by any means, she hadn't exactly been a star pupil at school. She'd left with a handful of scraped GCSEs and an absolute certainty that she was going to marry Jimmy Stones.

Okay, maybe she was an idiot sometimes.

And now, here she was, a time traveller, dashing around the universe with an alien in a blue police box that didn't always do as it was told. She could barely begin to imagine what she could possibly see. Think of all the places she could visit. The future was obviously an unknown to her, but the past? In the hands of someone who knew what they were looking for, someone a bit more qualified, the opportunities were endless. Think of all the mysteries and questions they could answer. What killed the dinosaurs, that sort of thing?

But it wasn't some history boffin he'd chosen as a companion. It was her, Rose Tyler. And some part of her felt it was her duty to find out the answers to some of this stuff. People didn't get this opportunity everyday. What if years from now someone asked her what she did with the gift and she couldn't think of anything? Even if she never told anyone, even if it was a little secret she just passed down to her kids and grandkids, someone would know which was better than it just being lost.

So, here she was now, a day later, sitting on a king size bed in one of the seemingly endless rooms of the TARDIS, surrounded by books. The lady in Waterstones had been a little annoyed with her vague ideas on what she wanted, but in the end she had come up with enough books on 'ancient mysteries, unanswered historical questions and stuff like that' to keep Rose going for a good long while.

The first book she had picked up was one on Jack the Ripper but she decided that wandering through the streets of London looking for a serial killer probably wasn't a wise next step. She'd nearly been killed twice already and wasn't about to test her luck any further. The second book was about the discovery of a load of human skulls made of quartz crystal. Interesting, but a quick flick through showed it to be too complicated to start with.

The third one gave her pause for thought. It had a picture on the front of what she figured was an Egyptian statue. It looked just like the ones she'd seen in those Sunday afternoon sword-and-sands epics her mum was so fond of. It was of a very graceful, noble looking woman, and the title simply said 'Nefertiti'. The cover was obviously doing its job well because she immediately turned over and read the blurb, intrigued…

'For over a decade Nefertiti, wife of the heretic king Akhenaten, was the most influential woman in the Bronze Age world; a beautiful queen blessed by the sun-god, adored by her family and worshipped by her people. Her image and her name were celebrated throughout Egypt and her future seemed golden. Suddenly Nefertiti disappeared from the royal family, vanishing so completely that it was as if she had never been. No record survives to detail her death, no monument serves to mourn her passing and to this day her end remains an enigma.'

Well it was certainly the kind of thing she was looking for she conceded as she opened the pages and began reading.

She had no idea how long had passed and only looked up when the Doctor entered the room looking mightily pleased with himself and more than a little smug about it.

"I fixed it", he said with a grin.

"Really," Rose said, feigning surprise, "Because it certainly sounded like you were losing earlier."

He shook his head, "She's a stubborn old thing, but I always get her going in the end."

He said it with such a dewy-eyed fondness that Rose laughed slightly.

"What you been doing then?" he asked, propping himself on the bed next to her, "What's that?"

"Just some old school stuff", she lied, not entirely comfortable with him knowing how inadequate she had made herself feel the day before. And how silly it was that she somehow felt like she was representing the human race and didn't want to let them down by being some stupid little blonde girl.

"It's better than I remember," she said, telling the truth this time, "I mean, Nefertiti, she was pretty cool. Ancient girl power and all that. I wonder what happened to her. I mean some people think she was murdered cos she was too powerful, but her husband was crazy about her and I don't think he would have let it happen."

She was a little shocked and pretty pleased at how much information she had managed to retain. If only they'd covered this stuff at school…

"She could've died of plague of course," she continued, recalling one of the other theories she'd read about, "That did do in a couple of her daughters about the same time that she disappeared and-"

"Wrong and wrong," the Doctor interrupted.

Rose sat up from her slouching position, suddenly intrigued.

"You know what happened to her?" she immediately assumed.

"Oh yeah," he said in a rather blasé manner, "Easy one that. No mystery there at all."

There was a long expectant pause.

"Well!" Rose eventually had to prompt, infuriated.

"Oh," the Doctor said, suddenly realising what she was waiting for, "She was taken by aliens."

Rose laughed, "Oh, give over!"

"Seriously! They liked the Egyptian culture so much they decided to do a little redecorating of their own planet and wanted a Queen to go with the palace they built."

Rose was still looking at him sceptically.

"Well," the Doctor said, standing up and holding out a hand to help her join him, "It seems we've found a place to take a test drive to."