"It was nothing." The way he said it, the way the words fell from his lips, Rose knew it was a lie. Unease settled over her. The Doctor lying, just as River had said.
"You mentioned to me once, half-you, doing something you knew you shouldn't. You dreamed it, after you had already left and we were together on Pete's World, you dreamed –"
"I didn't change anything, Rose," he said sharply.
"Then it wasn't on Mars? Changing a fixed point, that didn't happen? It was just a dream you had, a nightmare?" Rose was looking at the door again, tracing the grain of the wood with her eyes, imagining her husband bursting through the double doors to her, manic grin lighting up the room just before he swept her into his arms for a hug.
"Even if I did, it's not anything you would understand."
Rose flinched at the harsh words. Yes, he had changed, a culmination of all the dark parts of her first and second doctor feeding into the Time Lord Victorious. "No, you're right. I wouldn't understand. I wouldn't understand why someone didn't stop you."
"There was no one, Rose. Don't you understand? I was alone." He was still on the other side of the console, only voice, only an angry voice, echoing through the metal room.
"And the other times? The Pandorica? LakeSilencio? Was no one there either?"
"They couldn't do anything. Amy and Rory and River. The entire universe was going to disappear into the void, Rose. I couldn't let that happen."
"You didn't use to think your companions were useless. You used to rely on us, even if the world needed to be rebooted, you would have found a way to do it with them, not without." Rose was speaking to the door, her heart pinching unbearably in her chest. Is this what he had become without her? An angry old man, all on his own even when he was with others?
"I guess I have changed, then. I'm not a fool any more."
Her heart sunk. "Right." She slipped down from the console. "You should go now, Doctor, I'll see you in the morning."
She didn't look at him as she walked past, her intent to get to her bedroom, cry her eyes out from exhaustion, from missing her husband, from what the Doctor had become, and pass out into the oblivion of sleep. But his hand grabbed onto hers before she made it to the corridor and reeled her into him. He clasped her in a hug that was painful.
"I didn't mean that, Rose. Forgive me."
The absolute sorrow in his words made her heart race frantically. She felt tears creeping up on her even as she begged them to wait for solitude. "Tell me what happened. When did you become Time Lord Victorious?"
The silence stretched on so long after she asked she thought he wouldn't answer. Then he said, in a voice that rasped with emotion, "When I lost you."
"Doctor," she sighed sorrowfully into his chest, her arms coming up to wrap around his back and hold him to her. She had been so afraid of this, on Bad Wolf Bay, three years ago, this was everything she feared when she walked away, disappearing forever into the TARDIS out of Pete's world.
"When I lost you to him, to me. I'd been going through the motions for two years, Rose. Two years of slowly losing who I was because I wasn't me without you. I regenerated for you, Rose. I regenerated for you. Without you, how could I be that person any longer? And then I had you back. For that brief wonderful time, even though I thought we were to surely die, I was going to die with you, and that was alright. The world was going to hell, but I was going with you and what more could I ask for after nine hundred years?"
She was crying now, unable to help it, her tears soaking into the coarse fabric of his tweed that rubbed against her cheeks with each of his labored breaths. They were wrapped around each other, a hug so familiar but one they hadn't shared in a lifetime. The console rooms were too bright, too sterile for how personal this conversation was, but that was life on the TARDIS and neither noticed.
The Doctor pressed his cheek to the crown of her head, needing to be closer to her than it was physically possible to be. "Then I lost you. I lost you and what was the point? What was the point of anything I could do if I couldn't be with you? What was the point of all of my carefully held rules if they separated me from you?"
"You didn't lose me," she cried, holding him as close as the confines of their clothes and bones would allow, wishing so badly that she could take away his pain, heal his broken hearts.
"I did," he said adamantly. "I lost you twice. So I threw out my rules, because I didn't have to be the only survivor. I could be the winner, the Victorious. Time Lord Victorious, that's who I became, and the rules of time obey me. Time can be rewritten, so I rewrite it to keep people with me, to save the people I need to save, because I couldn't save you, I couldn't keep you with me."
"No!" Rose, pushed back from him, needing to see him. He wouldn't look at her, though, couldn't. He stared over her shoulder, his arms refusing to let her move any farther away from him.
"That's not how it is, Doctor. You are not alone and you shouldn't be victorious, no one should. It's wrong. You used to know that, even if you needed reminding, you knew it."
His face turned to hers, pain written in every line, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth a grim curve. "We could have been together, Rose! Together forever, just like you promised. Time obeys me, it can be rewritten! I could have – "
"No, you couldn't!" Rose shook her head wildly, hair sticking to her cheeks that shone with rivulets of salty tears. "Don't you remember? Sarah Jane, what she told you? The Krillitanes offered you a way to save everyone, but Sarah Jane, she told you that the universe has to move forward. That pain and loss define us just as much as happiness and love. That everything, everything has its time, a world or a relationship, and everything ends."
She was pleading with him now, begging him to remember who he used to be, to see things the way he once had, because she knew if he didn't, he would end up not only a destroyer of worlds, but of himself.
The Doctor could not be a god, so Bad Wolf took over, saying the words Rose felt in her soul. "You are the Doctor, last of the Time Lords, but you are not Victorious. You are not more than these people you protect. You are not a god. It is from the false gods that you protect these people. Do not become that which they need protection from. You would not let me become one and I will not let you either."
Rose was burning in his arms again. In that moment, the Doctor hated Bad Wolf as he hated his enemies. He hated Bad Wolf for endangering Rose, he hated it because it knew Rose's worries and fears in a way he did not, he hated that it took her from him whenever it pleased because they belonged together, they were inseparable. And he hated it because it said that Rose feared him.
"You're wrong." His throat was clogged with emotion, but he pushed the words out anyway. He needed Rose back. He would deal with the complications later, the accusations of becoming someone to be feared. And wasn't what Vastra had said to him at Demon's Run?
"You're wrong, Rose. Not everything ends. Not love." The Doctor cupped Rose's jaw in his hands, forcing her face up to his and pressing his forehead against her so that he was all she could see. Her eyes shimmered golden behind a sea of tears. "Not love. And I always will, Rose Tyler, even if I never say the words. I always will."
Rose's tears gave way to sobs and she lost sight of the Doctor, obscured from her vision by watery blurs. They rolled down her cheeks, some of them glistening the same way her tears had on Satellite Five. Her arms convulsed around him, clutching him like a drowning woman, and together they crumpled to the ground, a tangle of limbs, the grating biting angrily into their skin, imprinting red patterns of diamonds on their shins and thighs.
"Always, Doctor, always," Rose promised, her mouth against his ear as he pulled her bodily into his lap, every centimeter between them feeling like a vast ocean.
The Doctor's tears fell onto Rose's hair, tangling it further, dripping off his straight nose, rolling down his cheeks. "I'm sorry, Rose," he cried, "I'm so sorry. I should have saved you in the Ghost Room, should have switched levers with you, been cleverer, done something, anything."
"No, no!" She buried her face against his neck, the heat of her cheeks pouring into his cool smooth skin. "You were fantastic, brilliant, it wasn't your fault, it could never be your fault. I never thought that, never. It was the lever, just a stupid lever."
His hold on her felt permanent, as if he could mold Rose into his arms and never be forced to let her go again. He needed this, needed her more than he had ever let himself remember, because remembering hurt and this, this bloody well hurt like hell.
"I left you, Rose! On BadWolfBay, the second time, I left you! How could I do that? How could I do that to you? I promised you, Rose. I promised, never to you. That I would never leave you. But I did! Because I couldn't give you my forever and he could and he was me and I wanted you to be happy. I wanted to be the one to make you happy!"
Rose pushed back her tears and wrenched herself far enough away from the Doctor that she could see him clearly. She pushed back the mess of tangles her wet hair had become until he was the only thing in her line of vision. "You daft, stupid, alien!"
The Doctor's face pinched at that, tears running down his cheeks, his eyes staying open wide as if he was afraid that by blinking she would disappear.
"I never cared about that." Her hand came up to trace his jaw, then dropped to intertwine their fingers, desperately needing the feel of his palm against hers, the way it always had been.
"It didn't matter to me if you ever aged at all, if you could only give me part of your life instead of all of it. You were the only thing I wanted, in all the universe, it was you, only you. I was ready to spend my forever without ever seeing my true family again, because you had become my real family. I was whole when I was with you and I was missing half of myself when you were gone."
The Doctor's left hand cupped the side of her chin, his thumb pressing into her the apple of her cheek. If he could, he would have marked her with his fingerprint, left his mark for all to see that this girl, this simple human girl was his, had given herself to him freely and he wouldn't give her up to anyone else.
"But it didn't matter that you left me. It hurt, but I understood. How could I not? It mattered to you so much that I would grow old, decay. So you gave me him, and he was you, you gave yourself to me. We have our forever, together. But Doctor, you must know, that means you have my forever too. You will always have my forever, you will always have my love, even if it's in another universe. Please don't forget that. He is you and I love you. Forever."