The Doctor, Rose, and David Vaughan, son of Harriet Jones PM, sat around a table in Starbucks in Greenwich.

"I have so many questions I want to ask you," David broke the silence. "But I don't think this is the ideal place to do it."

Rose looked at the Doctor, his face was inscrutible, giving nothing away. She frowned. "I don't know…"

"Look, if this was about finding you and "capturing" you because you upset my Mum." David did the "air quotes" thing. "Don't you think there would be a shedload of army blokes surrounding the place? I just want to talk, that's all. If you don't, fine." He shrugged. "You can just walk away. Coffee's been paid for, I have the interview for my article…"

"So you weren't making that up?" Rose asked.

"Everything I've told you is the truth." David said.

"Just a slightly edited version, though." The Doctor finally spoke up.

"So, you're telling me that if I'd asked to interview you both that you wouldn't have tripped merrily into the nearest parallel universe to avoid it?"

"You can't travel between parallel universes." Rose said matter of factly.

"Oh. I'll have to remember that." David smiled. "And you'll have to tell me why you know that."

"Okay." The Doctor said after a moment of silence.

"What?" Rose looked at him.

"What?" David repeated.

"Okay." The Doctor smiled. "What do you want to know?"

It was a short drive from Greenwich to David's dockland apartment. Privacy so they could speak freely, but not so secluded that it would scare them off. The apartment was bright, but cluttered. A large bookshelf covered one wall. Rose examined some of the titles. A curious mix of medical books, music reference books, biographies, assorted scifi and thrillers… definitely the product of more than one person. The Doctor was looking at an array of framed photographs on top of a sideboard. The largest one was an informal family portrait and sure enough, there was a younger looking David with Harriet Jones and 2 other people that looked like his dad and a sister. A dark haired woman featured prominently in other pictures. A wife or girlfriend, probably.

"That's Claire, my girlfriend." David answered the unasked question. "She's a Doctor… a surgeon, actually." The pride in his voice was obvious.

"Where does she work?" The Doctor asked.

"The Edenwood Clinic. It's a private facility a few miles from here. It's not exactly frontline NHS stuff." David explained. "She does surgery on rich people, basically. But she also gets to do a lot of research. I'm convinced she'll have a Nobel prize in the next 5 years because she's going to make some magnificent breakthrough in the fight against cancer.

"Did you meet in medical school?" Rose asked.

"We were friends in first year. We didn't get together until about 3 years ago." David explained. "But enough about me! We're here to talk about you."

The Doctor started off small, explaining the TARDIS, how he could travel in space and time. He gleefully recounted stories of aliens and monsters and derring do. The Doctor threw himself in full tilt, even going so far as to explain that he can regenerate. Rose had heard some of the stories before... even been involved in a few of them, but she was as riveted as David to hear some more.

"...So you saved the world?" David smiled incredulously.

"With alarming regularity, but I don't like to boast." The Doctor shrugged.

"Yes he does!" Rose contradicted.

"Oh, who am I kidding?" The Doctor grinned. "I love to boast. Here I go! Boasting about boasting!"

Even though David was recording the interview he constantly took notes. Further questions to ask, some of the unfamiliar words the Doctor had used and a few random observations. Being an expert at upsidedown reading, the Doctor noticed a phrase David had used "Two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl year after year." A lyric from the chorus of Pink Floyds "Wish You Were Here"

"Lost souls?" The Doctor asked, somewhat deflated, hoping David would explain the remark.

David put the notepad face down on the table. "Well... you've just told me you're over 900 years old, that you've gone through several incarnations because you've died... I'm not 30 yet and I've broken my wrist and my heart, seen the Grand Canyon and buried people that I love." David looked intently at the Doctor. "You know me a couple of hours and know that I have a family and a girlfriend. All I seem to be getting from you is surface. Don't get me wrong, it's all fantastically entertaining in a Dan Dare/Han Solo kind of way and if I breathe a word of this to anyone, I'll probably be locked in a rubber room for the rest of my life, but I think it's all a mask and you're hiding. Do you have a family of your own? A partner? Children? You don't go through that many lifetimes without love, loss, grief, pain... You even laughed off the regeneration thing. Oh, I died and then I came back to life looking different. Nothing about how much it hurt, the sensation of it, the fear the first time you went through it, the uncertainty..." David shook his head. "Without that it just sounds like a well told fairytale. Only for what my Mum told me, I'd have taken all you've said as an imaginative work of fiction. Life has to be more than a series of jolly japes. Without the humanity..."

"I'm not human." The Doctor interrupted, a frosty tone to his voice.

"Now you're just arguing semantics." David was getting frustrated. "You could probably tell stories non stop for the next week, but it would still tell me nothing about the Man."

"Hey. Leave him alone." Rose stepped into the fray. Her voice was calm and even. "He doesn't have to tell you anything he doesn't want to. That's not how it works. Why should he open up to you? Pour out his hearts - yeah, two of 'em - to a total stranger. He sort of knows your Mum. Doesn't have a clue about you." She placed a hand on the Doctor's arm. "I've been with him a while now. We've been through a lot, him and me. But, some of the things he told you today, I'd never heard before. Just cos you're a journalist, doesn't give you a divine right to know everything, simply because you throw a tape recorder under his nose and start asking questions."

"So how did you know you could trust this stranger who keeps so many things from you?" David asked.

Rose smiled. "Do you think you can tell a smile from a veil?" She was paraphrasing more lyrics from Wish You Were Here "With him, I can." Both men looked at her. "What? Just cos I'm young doesn't mean my musical knowledge begins and ends with Take That – Robbie's my favourite, by the way. You can put that in my article! " she sniffed, indignantly. "Ask him how he knew he could trust me? Sometimes you don't need to know why you know."

The Doctor blinked rapidly and looked at Rose. "That... That was deep."

"Oh shut up!" and she backhanded him across the arm.

The tension was broken and David took this as his chance to get the interview back on track. He looked at his notes. He had the word Christmas circled. "Tell me about how you got onto the Sycorax ship?"

"We kind of got beamed up." Rose said. "I came out and your mum was there telling everyone that she was in charge."

"How much did she tell you?" The Doctor asked, surprised at David being able to name the alien invaders.

"She went into great detail, actually." David replied. "She thought we had the right to know why we ended up on the rooftops."

"Oh no." The Doctor said quietly.

David nodded. "While that whole crisis was going on, her husband and two children were in an alien's thrall."

"I had no idea." Now the Doctor understood why Harriet set the weapon on the Sycorax. He still didn't agree with what she'd done, but what parent wouldn't move Heaven and Earth, do the unthinkable to protect their child?

"And that's why I wanted to talk to you both." David said. "You've saved my Mum's life… That puts you on the Christmas card list! I should take you out and buy you a pint! But in the meantime, please continue…"

They talked for hours, completely losing track of time and stopping only when the door to the apartment opened. "That would be Claire. She doesn't know as much about what happened at Christmas as I do. It was easier not to go into too much detail."

"We should go." The Doctor said as both he and Rose stood up.

David shook their hands. "Thank you. This has all been very enlightening."

Claire came into the living room as they were about to leave. "Hi?" She said, a little surprised to see David at home. The Doctor and Rose passed her smiling, but saying nothing.

"I'll be back in a bit, okay?" David said, kissing her on the cheek.

"Okay. Who are they." Claire asked.

"They were just helping me with some research." He shrugged. "See you later."

David drove Rose and The Doctor back to the Powell Estate. As they were getting out of David's car, the Doctor wrote his mobile phone number on a scrap of paper. "If you want talk some more." The Doctor said. "And say hello to your Mum for me."