Prologue

One more anomaly remained, a small one, inconsequential to the scheme of things. A police box sat on a non-descript street in a bland suburb, next to a plain wrought iron fence and an average-looking tree. Police boxes hadn't been around for decades. A few people stopped for pictures, tourists off the path on the way to their bed and breakfast and reminiscing locals who didn't know why it'd been left there wondered if they were going to start using them again. A few of them tried the phone. Fewer tried the door and found it impossible to move, wouldn't even budge a centimeter. It was much stronger than the battered appearance made it seem.

It was an hour before either Rose or the Doctor moved. They had dragged each other inside the TARDIS and made it as far as one of the benches facing the console before collapsing. Rose folded down over her knees, still crying softly and the Doctor sat beside her, one arm over her shoulders as he stared into the swirling energy in the shaft of the time rotor. He'd almost ended two worlds, almost let an alien girl who had lived two insignificant Earth decades share the blame with him. The simple act of sitting with her father as he died had seemed such an innocent request, circumstances he could control, but he couldn't control any of it in the end. He was right, well, the other him was right, he should have known, shouldn't have taken the risk when he knew that nothing in the Universe could stop the reapers if something went wrong. By now he ought to know that it always did, his memory wasn't that compromised.

The Time Lord finally looked at the Human as she quieted and lifted her head. The enormity of all that happened and all that didn't slowly settled into both their minds. If the other TARDIS hadn't shown up Earth would have ended, now and in the future. The TARDIS knew it. At the moment she had retreated from the Doctor's awareness, needing time to forgive the chance he'd taken using her. It was the timeship's absence in his mind that finally broke him, made him slouch forward in turn, his head nearly between his knees. He didn't react, expected it in fact, as Rose's arm stretched across him and her other hand took hold of the arm closest to his own. He did turn his face toward her slightly when she lowered her head on the arch of his back. A few tears drifted sideways across her face but had dried for the most part. Too exhausted to feel anything for herself, she turned her attention to the Doctor, finding it was easier to cope if she was focused on someone else.

"It's all right, Doctor. It didn't happen; it's just like it was before." She moved her hand across his back, behind her head, mimicking Tegan, hoping it was familiar and effective. She listened to his slow breaths and the beating of both his hearts and then felt his voice as much as heard it when he finally responded.

"No thanks to me, Rose. I was right, he was right. The most I should've done was made sure someone else was with your Dad, even just me. I knew better than this." His voice became muffled as he turned to look back at the metal deck. "Our first time 'round together, you saved my life before you knew that the TARDIS could travel in time. I'm sorry I said what I did. I wasn't upset with you, I was upset with me, and I owed you better."

Rose lifted her head from his back, then raised her knee up onto the bench and turned so that she was facing him. "Maybe, but maybe I was using you and didn't know it. Maybe a part of me did want to do what I did… but so bad that I didn't know." She stopped talking, crying again softly herself, blinking hard as she leaned forward to lift the Doctor's chin and turn him toward her. "And maybe you just know me better than I do but I promise, I promise, I'll never not listen to you again. Please, please… can I stay?"

The Doctor grinned for a moment against her hand, "Oh, if I had a hydrogen atom for every time I heard one of you say you'd listen… it'd be the Big Bang all over again." The smile evaporated suddenly and he shook his head in her hand. "Only the best travel with me Rose, the ones who don't get drawn in by all they see, the ones I know won't use me, especially since the Universe did. You're not to blame for any of this Rose Tyler, the fact that you want to be proves you shouldn't. It's me; it was me trying to make you understand."

Rose straightened and used both her hands to wipe the tears from her face, "Understand what?"

The Doctor met her eyes and then looked through her into himself. "Me, I think."

"That's sort of a tough job. You don't give me a lot to work with. It comes in bits and then I try and put the pieces together when you're not lookin' and no one's tryin' to kill us." She smiled at him weakly and rested her head on her knee. "What d'you mean "you"?"

The Doctor broke eye contact with her and sat back, looking up at the distant ceiling and not seeing it, the loose cables drifting in loops above them. He knew why he liked this console room instead of the clean, small white one he'd used for so many years. It looked unfinished, it looked like a work in progress, it looked broken, like him, like the person he'd become. "Where's the first place I took you, the first thing I showed you?"

Rose followed his example, sitting back on the worn yellow cushions and staring upward, her hand blindly finding his between them. "You took me to the space station. You took me to see the end of the world."

"Aye, the end of the world, the last of your kind. Some host I was, some mysterious alien Time Lord offering to show you the wonders of the Universe… The first future I take you to the end of everything for your planet, the thing for me that's left me a soul that's barely more than pieces."

Rose tightened her grip on his hand at his words and turned toward him, her eyes filling again as his own remained fixed on an unseen ceiling as continued. "I wanted you to know what it was, I suppose, the whole of Time and Space and so I take you to the end of your world. Forget the rest of what happened, it's that I took you to see."

Rose shifted her hips and moved closer to him, holding his hand in both her own now. "I figured that out, you know, after the first few days here, first few nights layin' about tryin' to figure out how all this happened, why me, why you. It wasn't that hard after what you told me about your planet, what you 'ad to do. You wanted us to have in common the worst thing that'd ever happened to you."

The Doctor's reverie with the ceiling ended then and he turned to look into her eyes, "Pretty transparent, hmph? So transparent I couldn't see it myself till now." He took a slow breath and brought his other hand over to join the knot the others made. "Nyssa, her world was destroyed, too. I rescued her from that, took care of her, helped her to find her way again. She's the last of her people, too, but she found a purpose again, ended a lot of suffering. She's a scientist, a doctor. Got me through that regeneration you met."

Rose nodded slowly but frowned, "She didn't look any older than me."

"People aged pretty slowly on her world. It was a beautiful place, a lot like Earth take out a few wars. It was the last planet in the Universe that deserved what happened to it. At least with Gallifrey it went to save something greater, at least I hope it did."

Rose let go of his hand to stroke his face with one finger, watching his concentration shift to the feel of it as it traveled down his temple and his jaw. "What 'appened to you shouldn't 'appen to anyone. No one should have to be that strong but you were, you are."

A smiled of irony quietly lit the Time Lord's face as her finger continued its recursive travels, "Not me, I'm startin' to think you met the strong one, the one of me who let people closest, who wanted to protect them the most, that part of us that knew we needed someone around after we left Gallifrey. The truth is you can't do this sort of thing alone. If you don't have someone to connect with, Time Lord or no, you forget why trying even matters. When we met I was mostly stopping the Nestene because it was almost a lark, kept my mind off things; I'd get save the world and no one would know. My own little purgatory. It was a game; if I'd wanted to just win, I had the anti-plastic to end it." The Doctor turned his head toward her slowly, a smile flitting across his face, a quiet one for once," But you changed all that, Rose Tyler, tagging along, asking stupid questions, makin' yourself a target. You're all good for that, you know. You made me go back into the companion business, made savin' the world matter." When he sat up slightly to turn toward her, Rose was crying again, but this time over a smile that stretched her full lips thin.

"Most people who ended up on the TARDIS had done it by accident or they had no choice. I don't often ask them, and never twice." This time when he smiled, she laughed just a little and her eyes glistened warmly behind the tears. The Time Lord sat up a little to look at her and take comfort in the sight but he sobered again after a moment. "This time, when you told me about your dad, I couldn't take it, knowin' somethin' had hurt you like that for so long, the idea of someone dyin' alone, what you were saving me from. I'm glad we did it, Rose, but it shoulda' been done different; all this was my fault. You could never ever have understood what I was ignoring myself. It's me, Rose Tyler, I'm the stupid ape."

Rose squeezed her eyes shut and forced out the last of the tears, keeping them closed for a moment to block out sight of the agony on the Doctor's face. She didn't know how much more she could take of his pain; it had become far worse to bear than her own. As she opened her eyes, she freed her hands and took his face firmly between them, her thumbs stroking his cheekbones, a gently teasing smile forcing its way across her face. "All right, then… Say you're sorry, Doctor."

A pained laugh escaped the Time Lord, but a laugh at least and he nodded his head as she cradled it. "I am. I'm sorry, Rose Tyler. Can I please ask you to stay?"

Rose laughed gently in turn, hearing her own words offered back to her, as strongly as she had offered them herself. She let go of the Doctor's face to pull him into her arms and he turned on the small, upholstered bench when they moved apart and rested his head against her neck. His eyes opened briefly and he looked from Rose's already sleeping face to the glowing column of light above them, one last ache unsoothed for now. 'I'm sorry to you, old girl', he offered silently and after a moment, he breathed a sigh of relief as the TARDIS re-entered his mind.