It's surreal, how quickly they lapse into some of their old patterns.

(It's strange, how they don't lapse at all into others.)

After sprinting down a series of halls and staircases down to his workshop (or "the dungeon" as the Doctor refers to it), without so much as a glance back to see if Rose can keep up in her gown and heels (she can't, so she slips the heels off and gathers them in her hand with her skirts while she runs), the Doctor pores over the dimension-hopper by the light of a crystal lamp. Breathless with anticipation, squirming in her uncomfortably tight bodice, Rose slips the shoes back on, pulling up her skirts and a stool so she can watch him work.

Swap out the gown for jeans and a hoodie, the surrounding stone walls for coral, and add a rumbling background hum, and they could almost be back on the TARDIS, chatting while the Doctor cobbles together spare bits into some kind of miraculous invention to help them on their adventure to Jupiter or Zrallor X or The Low Kirchief's Gilded Mausoleum. Or more accurately, Rose tries to chat; the Doctor seems too intently focused on his project to provide satisfactory answers to very many of her questions, brow furrowed and lips pressed tight as he tinkers with the hopper here, makes adjustments there. A pity—after all her work on the Cannon, Rose might actually understand a bit of his technobabble for once (though her suggestion of such just makes the Doctor bark out a short and disbelieving laugh. Still rude, then). Eventually, Rose abandons any attempts to talk shop, casting aside technical anecdotes for information on the Doctor's last few years, specifically how he ended up here.

(To say this task is like pulling teeth hardly does it justice; it would be more accurate to say the job is like trying to get an unwilling patient to admit they have teeth in the first place.)

"Okay," Rose says, "so, let me get this straight. The stars going out was just a byproduct of your standard run-of-the-mill Dalek nonsense."

"Yep."

"But all that's resolved now thanks to you, via the usual hand-waving and time magic."

"Yep."

"And now all the Time Lords are back somehow, too, cos why not."

"Yep."

"And as thanks for all your hard work, they exiled you here, to a prison planet?"

The Doctor heaves an impatient sigh. "Yes, quite. Good to see you've maintained your ability to memorize and regurgitate basic information over the years."

Rose chooses to ignore the barb; if the Doctor has been imprisoned here as long as it seems, it only makes sense he'd have misplaced a couple of social norms—not that he ever kept particularly good track of them to begin with.

"Why, though?" Rose asks.

Shrugging, the Doctor slips on a pair of specs, squinting at the half-disassembled dimension-hopper splayed open on the table before him. Something about its guts exposed to the open air and shining bright beneath the worklamp reminds Rose of a frog being dissected in health class, makes her feel a little queasy.

"Fear," the Doctor eventually replies, prying out a piece of the hopper with a pair of fine tweezers. "Fear, plain and simple. I have, on occasion, made things a little difficult for them, you see."

"You? Never," Rose teases, bumping his shoulder with hers.

Behind his specs, the Doctor's eyes flash with something that could almost be annoyance, but maybe it's just a trick of the light. "Couldn't properly control me, couldn't properly kill me—it never quite seems to stick, even if it's a death of the supposedly-permanent variety," he muses. "Not to mention you never know when a spare genius may come in handy. So, what do you do with the errant Time Lord who's simultaneously responsible for your inconvenient time-death and subsequent joyous resurrection?"

The hopper lying in pieces in front of him, the Doctor scans each in turn with the sonic, which, Rose notes with a small pang, looks every bit as different from its previous incarnation as the Doctor does. "Why, you make an example of him, of course," he continues cheerfully. "Strand him on some backwater rock full of barbaric rubes in some unknown corner of the universe, enclose the entire thing in an impenetrable looping EMP field that fries the gears of any kind of transport more technologically advanced than a rowboat, and point and laugh at him while he lives out his remaining regenerations without the ability to so much as reconfigure a Time Rotor, much less wreak havoc across the universe."

He wrenches apart a spare component with perhaps more force than is entirely necessary. "The perfect punishment for the perfect fucking crime," he mutters, grimacing in disgust.

The cursing surprises Rose a little—has she ever heard the Doctor properly swear before?—but even the Doctor has got his limits, Rose knows, and his time on this so-called barbaric planet must have taken its toll. She wonders exactly how long he's been here in this nameless place, wherever and whatever here actually is.

(She wonders what has happened to him in his time here, how much a place like this could change somebody.)

"So, tell me more about this prison planet," says Rose, glancing at the marble walls all around them, painted in flickering shadow by the crystal worklamps. "It's all sort of posh for that, isn't it?"

"I think you and I have got different definitions of posh."

Rose laughs. "I think you and I have got different definitions of prison. Or do all Time Lord jails look like something King Arthur'd live in? And why all that bit out in the arena, anyway? Is it some sort of twisted Time Lord entertainment thing?"

"You really don't let up with the questions, do you?" the Doctor says irritably.

Taken aback, Rose furrows her brow in concern, but she must have misinterpreted his tone, because not a second later he's shooting her a wide, winning smile, one she can't help but return. It's like magic, the way her lips stretch to mirror his, like she couldn't stop even if she wanted to. Thank god some things are still the same.

"What?" she asks, laughing.

"Oh, nothing." He returns to his work, but his smile stays firmly in place, as if plastered there. "Had a bit of déjà vu is all. Scoping out evidence and piecing together the clues, just like the good ol' days. Rose and the Doctor."

"The old team," Rose supplies.

"Holmes and Watson," the Doctor beams.

"Elton and Bernie."

"Jekyll and Hyde."

"What on earth'd you want to be them for?" laughs Rose.

"Why not?"

"Isn't one of them a beast? Just a wild animal in the shape of a man?"

The Doctor chuckles. "Well, that pretty much describes you, doesn't it?"

"Oi," Rose laughs. She's a little disgruntled at the insult, but she playfully swats his arm all the same. "Don't go saying any of that ape stuff again. That's one thing from my first Doctor that I don't miss."

"Your Doctor?" the Doctor asks slyly, one eyebrow piqued.

Warmth blossoms across Rose's cheeks as she registers the implications of her statement, his reaction after. But rather than scoot it under the rug like she would have done once upon a time, when she was so much younger and still had so, so much to learn, she simply looks the Doctor square in the eye, and smiles.

"Yeah, that's right," she says, her stomach flipping funny little somersaults in her gut all the while. "My Doctor."

The Doctor chuckles deep in his throat, a funny little noise that would sound patronizing coming from anyone but him. "Been thinking like that for a while now, have you?"

"Might've done."

"Rather possessive of you."

"Pretty rich coming from He-Who-Glowers-At-Pretty-Boys."

"Good point. Maybe it's my Rose instead, ever think of that?"

Her stomach flutters. "Nah, my Doctor's got a better ring to it."

"Hmm," he replies thoughtfully. Braiding together bits of wire, the Doctor furrows his brow in concentration, his tongue peeking pinkly between his teeth. Rose can't help but wonder if he subconsciously absorbed the gesture from her. "Don't know if I've ever belonged to someone before."

"How does it feel?"

The Doctor glances up at her. "Risky. But I've always liked a bit of danger," he says, with a wink.

Warmth floods through Rose and she beams at him like an idiot as the hopper beeps in his hands, a cheerful tweet-a-tweet-tweet that makes the Doctor whoop and slap his thigh. "And that right there, do you know what that sound is? That's the new EMP-resistant multi-passenger pre-initialization process, letting us know we'll be ready for a jump out of this hellhole any moment now," the Doctor says gleefully. "That, Rose Tyler, is the sound of victory. We do indeed make quite the team, don't we?"

He holds the half-disassembled hopper out to her expectantly, his smile radiating pure joy, and maybe it's just the tightness of her corset taking her breath away, but it's like all the air has left the room. He may look and sound like a stranger, his edges may be rough and his words too, but he's the closest thing to the Doctor that Rose has seen in years—he is the Doctor—and Christ, does Rose want to kiss him—so that's exactly what she does. On impulse, her heart hammering madly in her ears, she leans forward, accepting the hopper as she bridges the distance between them so she can press the gentlest of kisses to the Doctor's lips.

Fighting the emotion that threatens to well up upon first contact—the nights of longing and waiting and pining and hoping, the brief handful of moments in which she allowed herself to imagine that any of this might be possible, what it would all look like, how it would all feel—Rose closes her eyes, preparing to lose herself in the kiss. To happily drown. But no more than a second after her lips touch his, the Doctor violently jerks back, punctuating the air with a knife-sharp gasp as he scrambles away from her.

The two of them stare at each other, wide-eyed, Rose frowning in confusion, the Doctor watching her warily, wide-eyed. He looks for all the world like someone who's just had a nasty electric shock, a caged prisoner backing into the corner after a bad bout with a cattle-prod.

(Admittedly, she hadn't given him much warning, but how had she managed to misread the moment so badly? How had she managed to so badly misread him?)

"Erm, sorry," Rose says shakily, her toes clenching uncomfortably in their pumps. She runs a hand through her hair, her cheeks flushing flame-red from embarrassment. "I just assumed…"

Chest heaving with exertion, the Doctor watches her wordlessly, eyes wild and unblinking. Rose wonders. It's a bit much, isn't it, his reaction? She understands if her actions caught him a little off-guard, but surely a mere chaste kiss wouldn't be enough to throw someone so violently off-kilter. She remembers Cassandra using her hands to draw him close and practically snog his face off, apropos of literally nothing, and certainly he was a little stunned afterward, but nothing like this. Nothing at all like this.

"I'm sorry," Rose repeats.

(Just how much has this place changed him? What has this place done to him?)

"Doctor?" Rose asks when he doesn't respond, concerned. "Are you all right?"

A quiet knock at the door breaks the Doctor's manic silence, and secretly, Rose is glad for the distraction. "What is it?" the Doctor snaps, causing Rose to jump.

"So sorry, your Lordship," peeps a timid voice on the other side of the heavy wooden door. "But you said if we had any news—"

Within several long strides the Doctor has crossed the room, yanking open the door to reveal a furry mammalian young attendant trembling in the hallway. It's difficult for Rose to make out the Doctor's words, his back turned to her and his voice as low as it is, but she can see in the sharp set of his shoulders that he's working to hide tension, nearly trembling with the effort of keeping himself calm.

"What did I say about interrupting me here?" Rose can just barely hear him say.

The attendant shrinks away from him, unable to meet his gaze. "You said Never ever, your Lordship."

"Excellent, so your hearing is unimpaired at least, as is your memory. Why, then, are you darkening my door now? Which part of never or ever escaped your understanding? What part of my instructions did your Cretaceous-era brain manage to so woefully misconstrue?"

The attendant's gaze flickers down to the sonic, lying prone on the table where the Doctor dropped it, and she flinches. Rose wonders at that.

"But, my Lordship," the attendant stammers. "You also said that—"

"It's Your Lordship," the Doctor snaps, and the attendant shrinks away from him. "And you would do well to remember that."

He slams the door in the attendant's face before she can reply, heaving an irritated sigh. For a moment, he just stands there, face to the door, muttering under his breath, ostensibly to himself, though Rose honestly can't tell—she can't make out anything he's saying, now. She's willing to bet it's nothing good, though.

(Nothing about this feels good.)

Rose shakes herself. She's being unfair. Surely that's it. He's just a little different now, that's all this is. He's a little different, new body, new personality, landlocked on a new and horrible planet, but he's got all the same experience, the same memories, the same important stuff, and she's just having trouble adjusting.

It's not him. It's her. It's got to be.

Besides, it isn't unlike the Doctor to be inconsiderate, rude, even a little cruel at times, much as Rose hates to admit it. He is, after all, the man who took her to see the destruction of her home planet for their first date, who touted the nonconsensual use of dead bodies as "recycling" and seemed to think that life as a paving slab was, in any way, acceptable—the same man who agreed to let her watch her father die in the street, who destroyed Harriet Jones' life with only six simple words and no second thoughts. Surely this behavior isn't any worse than what Rose has witnessed before, or there must be context that she's missing, or his time on this planet has been harder on him than she knows. Maybe he's rankled by his powerlessness here, or maybe he has grown numb to it all, yet another series of tragedies marring a landscape already pitted and scorched with death and loss. Maybe it's the Time War all over again and he's actually sad and weary behind that ever-present smile, secretly crushed beneath the great stone wheel of resignation as dozens or possibly hundreds of people die in the sand before him day after day—which is something he surely doesn't have any control over, or surely he would have stopped it by now. Surely Rose is just overreacting to things.

Surely the suspicion slowly ramping up in her gut is wrong.

(Why would that girl look at the sonic like she was afraid of it?)

"Boy, I tell you, the help these days," Rose says, forcing out the joke despite the nausea rising in her throat. She grips the hopper a little too tightly. "Downright shame, isn't it?"

(Please, please let him know it's a joke.)

She throws her hands up in the air helplessly. "What are you gonna do?"

"Tell me about it," grumps the Doctor.

Rose swallows. "A little useless, aren't they?"

"Preaching to the choir."

"You'd think they'd have at least a little respect for your Lordship."

A sigh. "Yes, you would think that, wouldn't you?"

"Why do they call you that, anyway?" Rose asks, fighting to keep her voice casual. Inconspicuous. Her grip around the hopper is slippery with sweat, and suddenly her gown is claustrophobic, clinging to her, strangling the air out of her lungs even worse than before. "I mean, probably just because of the whole superior species thing, right? Everything just sort of falling into its natural order, you rising to your rightful place at the top?"

"Something like that, yeah."

"Uh-huh. Except, I thought you said you were imprisoned here?"

"Oh, I was," the Doctor mutters darkly. "I may be at the top of the food chain in this dungeon, but it's still a dungeon, believe me."

"Yeah, right," says Rose, her breath tightening in her throat. "Is that why that girl was so afraid of you just now?"

The Doctor's head quirks back in her direction, but he doesn't turn back around to face her. Instead, his shoulders tighten, almost imperceptibly. "Couldn't tell you, really," he says. "Probably just your standard barbaric fear of tech and anyone associated with it. Likely the dratted thing hasn't so much as come in contact with a toaster before I arrived. But it is little more than a circus animal, after all."

"Makes sense," Rose says coolly despite the several thousand alarm bells that have begun ringing out in her skull, because when has the Doctor ever referred to a sentient being as it? "'Cept you said earlier that all your machines were gone. But you've got a sonic right there."

The Doctor faces her with a shrug and a grin. "Just built a new one, didn't I?"

"Of course, makes sense, what with all the materials available to you here, the barbarism and the nothing-more-advanced-than-a-rowboat and all."

"Oh, you know me," says the Doctor, plucking his screwdriver off the table. "I'm resourceful."

"You're off, is what you are," Rose insists, stepping back.

Eying her suspiciously, the Doctor laughs. It's a surprisingly nasty sound, nothing like before, and did his teeth always look so sharp, or so many? "What a curious little human," he says, tucking the screwdriver away before wedging his hands in his pockets with a tight squeak of leather against wool. "Careful, now, or you'll say something I'll regret."

"Sort of like calling the TARDIS a machine? Since when does the Doctor do that?"

"Since now," replies the Doctor, his grin broadening.

"And since when would you let something like a missing TARDIS stop you from doing what's right, anyway?" Rose asks, backing away further, watching the Doctor as he follows after. Slowly, like a lion in tall grass, stalking its prey. Rose doesn't stop until the worktable is solidly between them.

"Why haven't you stopped those fights in the arena, Doctor?" she asks.

She swallows. "Are you even really the Doctor?"

"What a question!" the Doctor laughs. "A man changes his face and his voice and his personality and all of a sudden he must be a new person, mustn't he? What a narrow conception of personhood, what an over-simplified view of the world, what a narrow little mind you have, Miss Tyler."

Then he leans in over the table, his lips stretching thin and wide like a cheap Halloween mask. "Though I will admit, I'm not quite feeling myself these days."

Rose's grip tightens on the hopper till her arm shakes with the force of it.

"Who are you?" she asks quietly.

Before the Doctor—or the man who used to be the Doctor, or the man pretending to be—has a chance to answer, the hopper chirps in her hand once more, another chipper tweet-a-tweet-tweet, tweet-a-tweet-tweet shattering the silence. Pulse roaring in her ears, Rose acts without hesitation, smacking the button that will take her home.

And—

Nothing.

Horror washes over Rose like a tidal wave as the man chuckles under his breath.

"Pity," he murmurs, clicking his tongue in disappointment. "But you know what they say; If at first you don't succeed—"

Rose bites back a gasp as the man's gaze flickers up to hers, his eyes dark, now, boring into her like a pair of cold-burning fires.

"Shall we try again, my love?" he asks, mouth curling into a smile, and the second he lunges for her is the second Rose hurls the hopper to the ground and shatters it with her heel.

Quick as a blink, Rose darts off and grabs a tool off the table to chuck at the man's face but suddenly white-hot pain lances violently through her neck and head, sharp enough that she drops her makeshift weapon with a clang as she doubles over. Glowing white tendrils arc through her vision like lightning before receding, taking the pain with them. Gasping, Rose tries to stand, to run, but the pain strikes again, so hard it throws her to her knees.

"What—" she tries to gasp out, but the pain surges again, like a fire spreading from her throat to her skull to each and every nerve ending in her body, leaving her spasming and helpless. Through the haze of hurt and shock, Rose looks up to see the man aiming his sonic at her—at her collar. The collar that's so much like the one the attendants all wear, Rose realizes belatedly.

And that girl saw the sonic screwdriver, and she was so afraid—

Swearing, scrambling backward over the floor, Rose reaches up to tear the damned collar off her neck but the man hits her with another blast from the sonic, one strong enough to make her shout. The pain strikes like a lorry, twisting and wrenching her muscles and clenching the air from her lungs. Choking, Rose slumps to her hands and knees. Black bleeds into the edges of her vision, ink creeping in at the corners, and she knows she hasn't got long before her body surrenders.

"Who are you?" she spits out, fighting for air, for control, for anything.

"Finally! A question worth asking," the man chuckles. "Though to be quite honest with you, I haven't really had a proper name for a while now."

Rose can't make him out through her darkening field of vision, but she can hear his footsteps approaching, swears she can hear his smile, stretching wide and vicious over rows of eager teeth.

"But," says the man's voice, suddenly very close now, "you can call me Master."

His laughter is the last thing Rose hears before darkness swallows her.