A/N: Thank you to everyone who has reviewed and encouraged me to continue. Now, what happens when the Doctor has time to repent his tendency to speak without thinking.

Disclaimer: I. Don't. Own. Them.

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Chapter Three – Confessional

The Doctor had been pacing the Control Room for hours, trying to get his anger under control and figure out what the hell to do now. He hadn't meant that "universe's biggest tart" remark, really. It had just slipped out. Just because all the strays followed Rose home didn't make it her fault. He couldn't blame the blokes entirely, either. Rose was fearless, intelligent, ready for adventure - all the reasons he had asked her to be his companion. And beautiful to boot. A man would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to want her.

Well, that train of thought was getting him nowhere. Lay out the facts, then. One, Jack Harkness was on the TARDIS now, for better or worse. Two, Jack was obviously attracted to Rose. And seemingly everyone else he came across, but that was beside the point. Three, Jack had saved Rose's life, so of course she would have some feelings for him, and she was allowed to let him rub her feet if she wanted. Of course, the Doctor had saved Rose's life on more than one occasion. He stopped pacing. Did that mean she felt something for him? Would she let the Doctor rub her feet? That was a thought. No, it wasn't. He started his laps around the central column again.

Why was he acting this way? There had been other companions, but he had never cared whom they chose to spend their time with. Jealousy had never been a knee-jerk reaction for him before, why now? The Doctor realized that he had always felt somewhat possessive of Rose, right from the very start when he saw Rickey the Idiot cowering on his knees with his arms around her waist, holding her back from what she could be. What she was with him, the Doctor. She was his Rose. Except she wasn't, really. They were best mates, nothing more. He knew how Rose felt about him: she saw him as a father, a substitute for Pete Tyler. Didn't matter that he'd had some extremely un-fatherly dreams featuring her as of late, or that his arms sometimes physically ached to hold her as he had when they had danced together…

Bloody hell. He was going around in circles here, physically and mentally. What it all boiled down to was that he was a jealous git who had absolutely no reason to be. Young as she was, Rose was fully capable of making any decisions about her love life on her own, and he had no say in it. He was a 900-year-old Time Lord, not a jealous teenager. It was time to start acting like it. Push away the urge to strangle Harkness then, and pretend everything was fantastic. He was good at pretending.

He was not so good at apologizing. Not sincere apologies, at any rate. "Right, your work's going to blow up in about thirty seconds, sorry!" he could handle. He wasn't connected to those people. Apologizing to his best mate, who had recently proven that she was her mother's daughter in the slaps department was different. He had let Rose in, and now she was part of his life. And if they were going to live together in the TARDIS with "Captain Jack," they needed to put this whole sorry incident behind them. He was going to have to tell Rose he was sorry, there was no way around it. So be it. Better to get it over with now and return to the way they had always been. The Doctor and his plus one, Rose Tyler. And her plus one, Jack Harkness. He muttered a curse that the TARDIS didn't see fit to translate and walked out of the Control Room like a man going to his execution.

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A/N: Hope that was a bit of an explanation for the Doctor's actions in the last chapter…I think the TARDIS crew went through a lot between the "She's mine" dip at the end of DD and the Three Musketeers phase at the beginning of BT, since it seems like a complete 180. BTW, I'm writing this without a beta, so if you're interested in the position, message me. It would make my painful revisions a lot easier.