"Clara Oswin Oswald!"
Astonishment and excitement flitted across the Doctor's face as he stood and stared at Rose, seeming to vibrate with barely-contained energy.
"No, it's ..." she muttered breathlessly. Rose! It's me, Rose! she thought desperately, but the words were choked off in her throat, refusing to be spoken. How could she possibly tell him who she really was? How would he even believe her, when she could barely even believe it herself? How could she explain what she barely understood?
"Clara. It's just ... Clara," she finished lamely, blinking hard and forcing herself to focus. She didn't really want to lie to the Doctor, but until she had a better understanding of what exactly was going on, Rose decided to play her cards close to her chest. After all, she didn't even really know who this man was anymore - she had no way of knowing how many years had passed for him between their last goodbye on Bad Wolf Bay and now.
"Do you remember me?" he asked eagerly, seeming to be oblivious to her internal struggle. The Doctor's hands were fidgeting restlessly as though he longed to reach out and grab her.
Rose watched him with a guarded expression, wondering how exactly she was meant to answer such a loaded question. Yes, of course she remembered this new Doctor - but she had only ever met him in dreams before. And the "Clara" who he had met back at the dalek asylum and in nineteenth-century England wasn't her, either.
"No," she finally replied awkwardly. "Should I? Who are you?"
"The Doctor!" he insisted, stepping through the threshold without being invited and smiling at her as though he expected her to suddenly catch on and throw herself into his arms in greeting. "No? The Doctor?" he continued, his grin falling into a look of confused hurt as Rose continued to simply stare up at him in disbelief.
He was so close to her, his eyes scanning every inch of her face for even the slightest hint of recognition. Rose wondered if his refusal to respect personal boundaries was a thing that he did with everyone now, or if it was just her. And if it was just her, then was it Clara, or was it actually her? Rose had so many questions perched right on the tip of her tongue, but she had absolutely no idea how to begin to give voice to any of them.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, finally settling on the question that seemed the least dangerous.
The Doctor flashed her an odd look before taking half a step back and exclaiming, "Well, I came here for you, of course! You phoned me - you were looking for the Internet."
"That was you?" Rose asked disbelievingly.
"Of course it was me," he answered with a shrug, his hands never once stilling as he continued to fidget restlessly before her.
"What, you've got a helpline number?" she insisted dubiously. Blimey, had he changed that much?
"So what if I have?" he asked defensively, giving her another strange, hooded look. His jaw was working as though he were slowly chewing over his next words before he finally asked, "Are you sure you don't remember me?"
"Yes, I'm sure," Rose lied with an easy shrug. She flashed him a teasing smile as she added, "I think I'd remember a chin like that."
"Oi!" he bit back defensively, giving her a look of mock offense as he rubbed his hands over said chin before narrowing his eyes at her once more. "Fine. If you're so sure, then I'll just be on my way, then."
Without hesitating, he flashed her his trademark, manic Doctor-smile and then turned around in a flurry of brown robes to head back out of the doorway that he had so rudely barged through just a moment ago.
"Wait!" Rose called after him, not really sure what she was going to say next, but knowing that she couldn't just let him leave like this. "Doctor ..."
But her words melted away as Rose stepped outside and took in the sight of the big blue box parked in the grass right outside of the front door of the strange new house that she had woken up in. The Old Girl looked bigger than what Rose remembered, but it was hard to tell if that was because Rose's dreams had never really been able to do her justice, or if she actually had grown a few inches in either direction.
The Doctor, however, ignored Rose's call and subsequent slack-jawed expression as he swung through the doors without a backwards glance and disappeared into the depths of his old time ship.
Rose didn't realize that she had unconsciously moved closer until her fingertips grazed against the bright blue wood and she gasped out loud as a song of elation and welcome immediately erupted in her mind.
"Oh!" she sighed, letting her eyes slip closed and basking in the warmth that the TARDIS was projecting into her head. "Hello again," she murmured quietly.
The TARDIS's song swelled until it felt as though it would shatter her skull with its magnitude and Rose became distantly aware that she was losing consciousness once more. She didn't have time to open her mouth and ask what was going on - she barely even had a second to register that something was happening at all before her legs buckled underneath her and she collapsed to the ground.
The only thing that she could remember after that was the soft whisper in her mind - a faceless, feminine voice singing softly to her as she slept. Welcome home, the voice sighed happily. At long last, welcome home.
When Rose woke again, she half-expected to be back in the universe that the Doctor had once dubbed "Pete's World", with nothing but an old, weary body and a house that was too large and too empty.
Instead, she awoke curled up in a bed that she had been in just a few hours before with an aching head and a few new, hazy memories. Rose blinked hard and forced herself to focus on the nightstand before her eyes as the room slowly came into focus. She couldn't exactly remember if the vase of flowers had been there before, but the plate of biscuits and the glass of water were definitely new additions. Had the Doctor put them there?
The flowers sparked an old hurt deep within Rose as the memory of her late husband resurfaced in her mind and she remembered the way that he would constantly find excuses to spontaneously leave her little gifts when she wasn't paying attention. Sometimes, they were just a few scrawled notes on a scrap of paper. Sometimes it was some small gadget or bauble that he had fashioned together by hand. More often than not, though, he liked to leave her roses.
These flowers, she noted, were not roses - and she wasn't sure if that fact made her feel better or worse.
Rose sighed as she forced herself to sit up and wearily rub the sleep from her eyes. There was still an odd humming going on in the back of her mind that she couldn't quite seem to shake. She subconsciously allowed herself to be led forward by it and ended up coming to a stop at a small window that was in the wall at the foot of her bed.
Her gaze immediately settled on the familiar blue box that still sat parked exactly where she had last seen it, and the man sitting in a folding chair just outside of it. It seemed that the Doctor had exchanged the monk robes for dark trousers, a white Oxford, and a dark coat that looked faintly Victorian. There was also a bowtie hanging just under that iconic chin of his, but Rose couldn't decipher its true color due to the dim lighting of the dark street outside.
All in all, she thought that the new clothes suited him much better than the old robes did, and Rose took a quiet moment to examine this (new, new) new Doctor while he sat there, bent over and fiddling with something in his lap that she couldn't see. His face was even younger than the last one she had seen, but she could tell that he had seen more than his fair share of added years during his time apart from her. But to someone just walking down the street with no idea of who (or what) he was, he would simply look like some handsome (if odd), young bloke.
Rose found herself grateful (not for the first time) that the Bad Wolf had gifted her with her own new body as well. This way, they at least looked equally matched, even if he still had over nine centuries on her.
"Hello ...?" she finally called down to him, her voice slow and hesitant as she decided to put an end to her musing and get his attention.
The Doctor blinked up at her in surprise for a moment before jumping to his feet and greeting her with a wide, infectious smile. "Hello!" he answered cheerily. "Are you alright?"
"I'm in bed," she stated flatly.
"Yes!"
"Don't remember going ..."
"No."
"What happened?"
"Ah, well, you seem to have lost consciousness outside of my fantastic blue box, here," the Doctor explained, gesturing to the TARDIS at his back and flashing her a teasing smile. "It was a bit odd. Most people wait until they get on the inside to do that."
"Right," Rose replied, her eyebrows drawing together in a confused expression. "Sorry."
"Nah, happens all the time," the Doctor scoffed, gesturing wildly with his hands as he easily brushed off her apology. "I do a lot of traveling, you know - been through my share of rough trips. Losing consciousness tends to happen every now and then."
"And ... what are you doing down there?" Rose asked, pointedly nodding to the folding chair behind him.
"Just working," he replied lightly. "You know - keeping an eye on things."
"'Things'?" she repeated dubiously, raising a teasing brow at him.
"Yes, 'things'," he agreed cryptically.
"You mean me?"
The Doctor lowered his gaze, then, and his suddenly sheepish expression made Rose smile. However, he had that strange, suspicious look in his eye once more when he finally looked up at her again, and she could feel her self-satisfied grin instantly fall into an expression of confused concern.
"Yes," he finally replied, his voice low and dangerous. "Among other things."
"Why?" she insisted curiously.
"Because you ask the wrong questions," he answered simply, turning his back on her and hunching back down into his folding chair with a heavy sigh.
It was Rose's turn to narrow her eyes in suspicion as she silently watched him for a few moments. However, it was soon made clear that she wasn't going to be able to get any answers by yelling at him from out of her window (was it her window?), so she quickly shut and locked the latch and raced down the stairs once more to join him.
He was bent over in the exact same position that she had left him in, fiddling with something in his lap again. Rose thought that she heard a familiar whirring noise, but it cut off as soon as she stepped closer to him and he stashed the thing away in his jacket pocket before she could get a better look.
"What do you mean, I 'ask the wrong questions'?" she asked him quietly.
"You know, I've been bouncing around this planet for over a thousand years," the Doctor mused out loud, "met a lot of humans in my time. Most of them don't just accept my name, though. It's always, 'Doctor who', and 'that's not a real name', or something like that. But you ..." He turned to flash her a weighted expression out of the corner of his eye as he slowly regarded her from top to bottom. "You insist that we've never met before, and yet you just accepted it, no questions asked."
Rose opened her mouth to respond, but she was cut off as he jumped to his feet once more and began pacing dramatically around the TARDIS. "And this!" he exclaimed loudly, rapping his hands against the blue paneling for emphasis. "What about this, eh? Great big blue box parked right outside your house with no explanation as to how it got there. Strange man goes inside and comes out wearing a completely new outfit." He tugged his lapels and straightened his bowtie as he flashed her a teasing, challenging grin before asking, "Not even the slightest bit curious?"
"Hold on," Rose insisted, bringing her hands up as though to grab him and force him to be still. It seemed that this version of the Doctor could be just as exhaustively energetic as the last one she had met. "Did you say ... 'a thousand years'?" she asked slowly.
The Doctor blinked at her for a moment before another wild grin stretched over his young new features. "Ah, there, you see? Now you're getting it," he stated brightly. "That's the right question!"