When he comes to, she's gone.

Well, not gone gone, he thinks, not unless she left naked. Two sets of garments are strewn about the place, hers mixed with his, tossed to the floor and hiding under the furniture and wound up in the blankets. But the Doctor opens his eyes to find the other side of the bed unoccupied, and for the first time, it seems strange. He has never thought of a bed as something that could be empty before.

Locating his trousers and his tee-shirt, he pulls them on and tries not to wince. Cotton and wool scratch over tender skin, the wounds on his knuckles reminding him of their presence with a sting. But already they've begun to heal. It's almost pathetic, how disappointed he is by that.

He finds Rose in the galley.

Unable to think of anything that doesn't sound awkward, or even worse, dismissive, or even worse than that, pithy and sticky-sweet, the Doctor stops in the doorway to watch her for a moment. Rose wears his shirt and not much else, stands on her tiptoes as she roots around in the freezer. The sight of her searching for a snack, something he used to see quite often once upon a time, brings a smile to his face. Makes something swell a little in his chest, leaving him feeling almost uncomfortably tender.

"Sorry," Rose says, closing the freezer door and smiling shyly at him. Her cheeks are pink, her hair is disheveled, and two spoons and three cartons of ice cream are clutched to her bosom, slowly dampening the front of (his) half-button oxford. "Bit peckish."

"When is the last time you ate?"

"Depends. Do you want me to lie, or do you want to be angry with me?"

The Doctor grimaces at that. "We have more substantial food onboard."

Rose's smile slips, and the Doctor catches himself. "I mean, I have more substantial food onboard," he amends, his voice stiff. "Not, you know. You and me."

"And here I thought you meant the royal we," Rose teases.

"Ah, yes," the Doctor says, and he can't help but relax a little. "In that case, we also have other things in the galley, and we would be happy to share them, and…" he trails off, stepping closer so he can pull on his rolled-up shirtsleeve on her arm, "…we can't help but notice that you're wearing my shirt."

"Yeah, well. I couldn't find mine quickly enough, so you're just going to have to deal with this one smelling like me for a bit," Rose says, catching the tip of her tongue between her teeth as she smiles.

The Doctor grins down at her. He can't help it; her smile is contagious and it's something he somehow never built up a resistance to.

"We can live with that," he murmurs, before bending down to kiss her.

Rose's mouth parts under his and he closes his eyes, losing himself in the kiss. Hints of chocolate and mint let him know that she's got into the ice cream already; he chases after the sugar-sweet taste, gently exploring her lips and beyond. Trapped between their bodies, the ice cream cartons are almost unbearably cold and unpleasant, spreading an icy dampness across the Doctor's tee shirt and dripping onto the floor, but he barely notices, crushing the cartons as he moves in closer. His hand travels up to cradle Rose's head, his fingers tangling in her hair.

There is nothing urgent or demanding about their kiss this time. It could almost feel like nothing is wrong, like they have all the time in the world.

"How long have we got?" Rose murmurs into his mouth.

"We're in the Vortex," he replies, trailing his lips down to her neck. He smiles when she shivers. It could just be the ice cream, but he doesn't think so. "Time is irrelevant."

Rose pulls back, but he doesn't need her questioning expression or his aching time sense to know that he's lying. As much as he wants to delay the inevitable, as much as he doesn't want to do what he knows he must, the longer she stays displaced from her own time and universe, the greater the likelihood of something happening that shouldn't. (That can't.)

"At least a few hours?" she asks. "I want to be here as long as I can, but the longer I stay, the harder it'll be to go."

"Surely we can have a few days," he tells her, bridging the small distance between them.

"Twelve hours," she protests feebly.

"Forty-eight."

"Twenty-four."

"Terribly cliché," the Doctor replies. "I'll take it."

Before she has a chance to reply, he pulls one carton out of her hands and tosses it over his shoulder. It lands somewhere behind him with a wet splat and the other two fall away when he hoists Rose onto the counter, ice cream and spoons thudding and clanging to the floor near his feet.


Time dilation is a phenomenon experienced by nearly every sentient being, on nearly every planet in nearly every universe; Time Lords are no exception. When you live as long as they do, time is basically a piece of taffy, stretching and pooling and thinning and doubling back on itself and re-merging and splitting off, drawn out or crammed together or savored as the consumer pleases. And then of course there are the days that there's not enough taffy, never enough, and you barely have a chance to hold it in your hands before it's melted and gone.

They don't talk about how little taffy they have left.

Instead, after the rumbling of Rose's stomach becomes too loud to ignore, the Doctor whips up a quick eggy-in-the-basket for them both. She teases him when he burns the bread; he replies by wiping his buttery fingers off on her thigh. (She smacks him in the arm for that, but it's worth it to hear her shriek in faux-outrage.)

They chat while they eat, reminiscing mostly. Tiptoeing around almost everything that's happened in the years they were apart, except for when Rose tells him fondly of Tony. The Doctor pastes a smile on his face and doesn't think about how he very nearly wrote her brother out of existence just a few short hours ago.

He takes her on an impromptu tour of the TARDIS—they don't call it that, of course, because calling it that acknowledges how long it's been since she had a proper walkabout in there, how she'll never get to do it again. Rose remembers the way from the galley to the library, from the library to the pool, from the pool to the garden. The TARDIS hums pleasantly in the back of their minds, and when Rose asks about it, the Doctor explains that she's happy to see Rose again, happy in her own strange way. Rose smiles and runs her fingers along the walls, over the books and through the grass; he smiles too and keeps his eyes trained on her.

"Run," he whispers in her ear when things become too quiet, and he pulls her to the console room, two sets of footsteps echoing through the corridors along with their laughs. Both of them bound around the console, dodging the tools that still lie about on the grating. His hands fly over the controls and he asks her where she'd like to go next.

It's a game. A play-pretend. She sees through it immediately.

She tells him to take her to an ice planet. No, a desert planet. No! One of those places with the bioluminescent caves, with the bird-moths that glitter like little neon green stars in the black night, and that's where they met the Duchy of Thebaine, and does he remember—?

Of course he remembers, but he likes the story the way she tells it. She likes the way he kisses her, after.

With a flourish, the Doctor charts courses for Byglis, then sixty-second century London, Meiji-era Japan, the Big Bang. He falls just short of pushing the routes through, but that doesn't matter; with his words, he transports Rose all the same. He tells her about all of the things they see, the things he shows her, the crystalline mountains and biosynthetic supercomputers and the Tokugawa Shogunate; she pipes up with the details of their adventures in each time and place.

(The mountains were actually alive all along. Someone's hacked into the supercomputers and learned to control the population. Kyoto is overrun with shape-shifting aliens and the emperor's son has fallen in love with one of them, someone who can take the shape of a fox; the shape-shifter must return home and the prince must marry, but every night for the rest of his life, the prince leaves a gap in a palace window that's just big enough for a fox to slip through.)

The Big Bang is almost too good to pass up. So the Doctor decides to cheat just the littlest bit; he pilots them to the far corner of the universe, to the year 4 million BCE, and with a complicated bit of jiggery-pokery that pings his time sense and stretches the limits of what the TARDIS will allow, he sets their timeflow so that they can watch the birth of a star unfurl in fast-motion. Of course, fast-motion still means it will take several hours to complete, from their perspective, but that's a fair sight better than a hundred thousand years. The Doctor opens the TARDIS doors and Rose gasps at the view, at the brilliant violence spreading slowly before her. Gases swirl in vibrant hues of scarlet and cerulean, matter sparkling in the darkness, and when Rose holds out her arm, the light dances over her skin.

It's not the Big Bang. But it's close enough.

"Can we?" Rose asks, and the two of them sit down in the doorway, to stargaze like they used to, oh-so-long ago.

(To say he watches her instead of the nebula would be a lie. But he relishes the warmth of her body pressed up against his, their bare feet swinging out idly into space. He memorizes the way their fingers intertwine, maps the pressure points of their palms, counts the beats of her pulse pounding in her thumb. Smiles at her cheek cushioned on his shoulder. Tells her about how stars are made, and catalogs every response. It's almost uncomfortable, this sort of intimacy; it's quiet and domestic and vulnerable and close. Probably the other him won't have much trouble with it, he thinks—probably the metacrisis Doctor will crave it, even. Human tendencies magnified exponentially by human DNA.

Lucky bastard.)

They leave the doors open when they finally get up, when Rose leads him by the hand over to the jumpseat. Light streams in from the nebula and paints Rose's skin like watercolor, illuminating her until she glows with otherworldly light.

"I love you," she whispers into his ear, pressing her lips there.

Warmth floods through him and he pulls her in for a bruising kiss.

"I love you," she gasps when they part, cupping his face in her hands so she can touch her lips to his chin, his cheeks, his forehead, his lips again. "I love you, I love you, please—"

He never could deny her anything.

(He still doesn't look at her, during, but he wraps his arms around her snugly, committing to memory the feel of her bare skin on his, the way her curves glow in the starlight.)

They don't hold each other very long, at least not immediately after. It quickly becomes too uncomfortable to stay on the jumpseat; it's a curious mixture of being both too-hot and too-cold and sticky and sore all at once. (But her hand never leaves his, not when he closes and locks the TARDIS doors, not when he pilots them back into the Vortex, not even when it makes things a little awkward as they're gathering up their clothes; he teases her and she replies with a kiss below his wounded knuckles.)

They quickly wash up. (But he'll never forget, for however much time he has left, the way her face lights up when he decides to join her in the bath, how she smiles when he wraps his arms around her. His fingers dance along her ribs and his nose and lips trace down her neck and she laughs as she squirms, ticklish, water running down her body in rivulets. The Doctor thinks of kissing her in the rain and he grins, glad they've got a chance to do it again.)

They pull their clothes back on, their own clothes, even his oxford that now smells of her; they dress in silence. (But the moment they're both done, they crawl back into his bed. Their bodies draw near and limbs entangle, their weight settling into the mattress like a pair of stones. He reads her a passage from his book and he wishes she wouldn't fall asleep, but he knows she can't help it; she walked a long road even before she found him, even before she saved him from himself, and she fights and loses the battle quickly. He breathes in the scent of her hair and counts the seconds along with her breaths.)

They hold each other for a long time after that.


The Doctor knows precisely when their time will run out, but the ringing of the Cloister Bell sets it in stone.

Rose tries to smile as they exit the TARDIS, heaves a sigh instead, air leaving her body in a loud and painful burst.

"So I guess this is it, then?" she asks, stepping into an alleyway in London, 2006.

He nods.

Drawing in a deep breath, Rose fortifies her defenses; the Doctor looks on as she girds herself with a tough outer shell once again. He doesn't like that she does that now. Hates the thought that she probably picked it up from him.

"Don't suppose there's any chance I'll get to hear the end of that sentence?" she asks. "Just—the last time I saw you, it was the younger you, and it sounded like you were gonna say—"

He shifts uncomfortably, and she struggles not to roll her eyes. "I know there's a lot of ways to show it," she tells him. "Other words and actions, or sometimes without saying or doing anything at all—"

"You know how I feel," he says, scratching the back of his neck as he looks away.

"—and I think you must love me," she continues, "even if you don't say it. I don't think you would blow up stars or tear up universes or make special calls from the future for just anyone. But—"

"Like you said," he interrupts. "Lots of ways to say it. Some of them just hurt more than others."

He swallows. "Some of them feel too much like goodbye."

Rose stares at him. "Doctor, this is goodbye."

"So it is," he replies, as cheerfully as he can muster, muscling past the sensation that something is squeezing painfully inside him. "Let me just say…"

She watches him hopefully, and he curses himself once again for his cowardice, for what he's about to say, and what he'll do after.

"…you were brilliant," he tells her, and watches the hope on her face go dark. "Utterly brilliant. Fantastic, even. Always have been, always will be."

"Right," Rose says, disappointed.

After a moment of standing about awkwardly, Rose steps forward and throws her arms around his neck, drawing his body flush against hers. He wraps his arms around her in response. Buries his face in her hair.

"I wouldn't have traded this for anything," Rose tells him. "Not a single moment of it."

The something in his chest squeezes harder. He squeezes her tighter in response. "Me neither."

He closes his eyes. "Thank you," he says quietly. "For everything."

Stepping back, Rose nods, bites her lip. "I hope it's not really the end," she rushes out, clutching his hands in hers. "I mean—I hope things turn out differently than you think, and that you won't be alone for much longer, and—and even if you can't say it back to me, I love you, and I always will, no matter what."

He smiles grimly down at their hands. His hearts race in his ribcage, thundering like they'll leap out at any moment. He can feel it; this is the moment to say something. The urge to speak rushes through him, swoops in his stomach and floods in his skull.

He has to say it now. He has to.

"Are you ready?" he asks, and goodness, does he ever hate himself.

"As I'll ever be," she laughs, and now his grin is genuine too, searing this moment in his memory.

He pulls his hands from hers, settling his fingers against her temples. She's warm, flushing beneath his fingertips. Rose watches him openly, eyes wide and lips pressed tightly together in an expression of absolute, unadulterated trust. Anxiety roiling in his throat, the Doctor forces himself to hold her gaze, knowing it will be the last opportunity he has to do so.

He almost falters, nearly pulls away. But he's got to go through with it. He can't allow himself to be selfish. Not this time.

Brushing stray strands of hair behind her ear, his thumb grazes over her cheek, and he doesn't know why that's the thing that breaks him, but it is, and it does. Telltale pressure builds up in his sinuses and as much as he begs his body not to do this, not to betray him, he can feel moisture welling up in the corners of his eyes.

Rose frowns. "Doctor?"

The Doctor leans in for one last kiss, his lips pressed in hungry desperation against hers.

He opens the link before she can say or see anything else.

Rose's eyes shutter closed almost instantly, her mouth falling open. The Doctor finds everything he shared with her quite easily, shining bright and clear on the surface of her mind. Memories that aren't hers, visions of diamond planets and erupting volcanoes and the end of the Time War, stand out against the rest. He draws them out, all of them, coaxing like a violinist with their finger creating a vibrato on the smallest string.

The relief he feels from her is almost instantaneous; it was, as he suspected, all too much for her to bear. He strokes her temples with his thumbs and says a silent thank-you, for sharing his grief and his shame for as long as she could.

When that's over and done with, he finds her thoughts of the last twenty-four hours that they had together, the newest strands of her memories. He lights on them, and even though his touch is gentle, Rose whimpers, her mouth twisting in unhappiness.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor says. His breathing hitches and his vision goes blurry, and when the tears have obscured her face completely, he blinks them away. Cinches his eyes shut. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I—"

The Doctor watches the last twenty-four hours play out in her mind and he hesitates, the unfairness of it all hitting him like a punch to the gut, leaving him winded afterward.

(Can't he be just a little bit selfish? Just the littlest, tiniest bit? Just one last time? It seems unbearably cruel to take these memories away forever, especially since they won't have any effect once she's safe in her own universe again—)

And then he realizes.

"I'm an idiot," he says.

Laughing, he shakes his head. He's never been so glad to be wrong before.

"Oh, Rose," he says breathlessly. "I'm so sorry I didn't think of it sooner. I'm an idiot. I hope you can forgive me."

Holding as tightly as he can without hurting her, the Doctor diverts his course of action.

He doesn't remove their last twenty-four hours together. Instead, he hides it, embeds it so deeply that even the thought of the thought doesn't exist. His consciousness is like a river, flowing gently over her memories and burying them beneath layers of silt. The memories are hidden, but they're still there, waiting to be found.

The Doctor suppresses a memory of a blue-sanded beach, a tour through London, a trip to Saturn, an embrace in the forests of Kepler-438b. He pushes further and finds memories of soft grass and a declaration under the stars. He obscures all evidence of that as well.

(He hunts down her memories of stepping foot inside a blood-red TARDIS, of convincing him to end an apocalypse of his own making, of forgiving him after; he's tempted to say a permanent good riddance to those, but he knows that wouldn't be right. She deserves to have her memories intact, the bad along with the good.)

Pulling disparate strands together, he helps her synapses fire in the temporary absence of information, urging her brain to build its own connections and construct its own theories. Her mind will fill in any blanks like eyes fill in blind spots, choosing the most logical explanation for anything she can't explain, until things come flooding back in again. Until someone pulls the trigger.

The Doctor buries her thoughts of neon gardens and his breathing goes ragged as he hides her memories of dancing in a ballroom, of running through cobblestone streets and stealing a kiss in the rain.

Swallowing painfully, he leans down until his forehead is pressed against hers. "I'm sorry I couldn't give you what you needed," he says, and his voice breaks on the words. "But I can at least give you this. You'll get this time back. When it's safe, you'll get it all back. When I tell you—"

The Doctor thinks of his other self drawing close to her on the beach, whispering something in her ear. He blinks and his cheeks are suspiciously wet.

"It'll still be me, Rose," he promises. "When I saw you running down that street, running towards me—that will always be one of the happiest moments of my very, very long life. Always. And that's the part of me that will stay with you. It'll still be me, telling you what you need to hear."

His eyes fall shut. "I'm sorry I couldn't tell you sooner. I would change it if I could. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Her consciousness begins to fade away, a light growing dimmer by the second. The Doctor presses a kiss to Rose's forehead, to her cheeks, to her lips. Her mouth moves against his, her lips soft and slow. But then the lights go out, and she doesn't respond at all.

The Doctor does one last sweep for anything suspicious. Satisfied, as much as he can be given the circumstances, he closes the link between them. Breathes deeply and picks up the pieces of his composure.

Rose sways forward when he moves away, unsteady on her feet, and he catches her. Cups her face in his hands while he looks her over, to make sure she's all right. Her eyes are closed, but her breathing is steady, her pulse strong. She'll wake up in a few moments with no memories of their time together since she landed in 2006, no remembrances of her time with this version of him at all.

He is content, however grimly, that he was able to do this small thing for her, without worsening things even further. Rose will lose very little of her memory in the end, will gain almost all of it back one day. And time is intact, its irrefutable points safe and fixed and sound. He has performed his duty, and performed it hatefully, admirably well. They both have.

(It isn't much of a relief; he would much rather she stayed here, with him, selflessness and the end of the universe be damned. But she made her choice. And he will choose to honor it.)

Soon enough, Rose will start to stir, awakening, and she'll open her eyes and wonder why the Dimension Cannon brought her right here, right now. The TARDIS will be gone by then. But the Doctor waits with her in the meantime, while her defenses are down. Wrapping his arms tightly around her shoulders, he tucks his chin against her head. To anyone passing by on the street outside, they could be any normal couple, taking a moment for themselves away from the bustle. Sharing a sweet kiss, or maybe a tender farewell.

He leaves as soon as her consciousness flickers again.

(He doesn't say goodbye.)


He is dying, and he has run out of time.

It's rather a self-indulgent little trip he takes, visiting all of his companions from the last few years. People have found joy in their lives, written books or had children or married and moved on, or will soon do so, and he's glad to see it, glad to help where he can. The Doctor figures he deserves this little bit of secondhand happiness; he earned it, with his oh-so-noble self-sacrifice and all.

(All he can say is, at least it was his choice, in the end. But people like Wilf make that choice an easy one.)

Ever-helpful, the TARDIS takes him everywhere he wants to go, everywhere he's needed, running down the list of beloved companions and heartsbreaking silent farewells until there's only one left.

The Doctor almost doesn't try to see her; he can't think of any opportunities he didn't seize, any stone he left unturned. It would be too dangerous to cross his own timeline a third time. And it almost seems sacrilegious, somehow, going back to see her yet again when the circle of their time together is so firmly, neatly closed.

Golden light pulses dimly, burning in his veins as his hands hover over the control desk. The last two times this happened, she was with him. Seems just a tad anticlimactic, somehow, if he doesn't see her for a third time. Right? Like an incomplete pattern, an unfinished thought, a discontented asymmetry.

So he tells the TARDIS to take him to London, 2005.

(There are worse things to be than a little sacrilegious.)

And there she is, in the crisp wintry English night; she stands in front of him in the snow, blonde hair and broad grin and just a little too much eye makeup. Rose Tyler, here, in this universe, smiling over at him in a pink hat and long scarf like nothing in the world could ever be wrong.

He can't help it. He smiles back. It's a fitting reward.

They've both earned it.