Twenty long years
Twenty years had now passed since Rose Tyler died on her own world. She was now executive manger of alternative Torchwood, on a world that was completely different to the world Rose spent nineteen years of her life on.
Now twenty years had passed, and Rose had slowly, over the years, become numb to her devastating loss. The flashbacks stopped after about 4 years, and she had even tried dating, but that had never worked out, so she threw herself into her work and family life instead of trying to find love.
When she had moments of quiet, which was not very often, she would wonder what her doctor was doing right now; whether he had found someone else…whether he remembered her. She would often wonder at those times, whether he had got through another regeneration yet, and if he had, what would he look like?
At her desk in Torchwood, Rose tried to imagine this now, but she couldn't see past his ninth or tenth regenerations. She looked at the clock above her medium sized office, which was cluttered up with papers and reports on alien landings, paperwork for each alien weapon recovery. Ten o' clock. Rose rubbed a hand over her sore eyes and, despite her tiredness, tried to carry on writing her report on the 2020 Slitheen invasion. Frowning, she looked down at her paper and realised that she'd written the same paragraph twice. Throwing her pen down, she got up, stretched and walked out of her office. As she locked the door, a security guard walked past on his night shift.
"Working late again, Rose?" It was Simon, one of Rose's friends.
"Oh, hello, Si, yup, working late, it's this stupid report, I've got to get it down to alien research in 2 days time."
"Oh ok, well, they're all rather stressed down there at the moment, so I wouldn't have it in late if I were you… you should have seen what patrollers brought in this morning… there was chaos! He looked like a human, but they couldn't tell, you never can with this place…" Rose did a double-take at this.
"Did they come to any conclusions as to what he was?" she'd heard something about it, but she'd been locked in her office all day, so only rumours had filtered through.
"No, like I said they couldn't work it out…they didn't do an autopsy on him though… they scanned him, and got the shock of their lives when they found he had what looked like two hearts-…"
Simon couldn't tell Rose anything else, because she had already charged off in the opposite direction towards Alien Research.