Forever
This was going to be awkward.
Perhaps that shouldn't have been the prominent thought in Rose's mind as she stood on Bad Wolf Bay, her gaze returned to the place where the TARDIS had just stood, and yet it was. The problem was that Rose hadn't a clue of how to deal with this. 'This' being the man still holding her hand.
Really, Rose had no frame of reference for what was going on. Despite her travels to every sort of culture in the universe, and despite the hastened learning she'd done by osmosis, she was still human. She could comprehend being stranded in a parallel universe, because it was simply heartbreak. The details were irrelevant; in her human views and expectations, this equated to being separated, forcefully. No other facts needed.
This, though. This was totally bizarre. This time she still had the Doctor, who wasn't quite the Doctor, but was, and although she knew she loved him because he was/wasn't the same man, she was struggling to get her head around that, and still the first Doctor (she tried not to call him the real Doctor) was somewhere out there, in a different universe, without her.
How on earth was she going to assimilate that?
She thought perhaps she should say something. Apologise for the inevitable confusion she was going to be suffering in the next few days, or maybe tell him that she loved him, since she hadn't actually told this one yet.
But she didn't really love him in this body, not yet. She didn't know him. She did, but she didn't, and... oh, there was the confusion.
Giving herself a little mental shake, she tried to rearrange her thoughts. The first Doctor, the Time Lord one, said that the second one, the human one, was like the Time Lord one's previous body. Clearly, though, he wasn't. He'd responded to her mum's teasing about Tony's name (hilarious, not) for one thing. For another, he'd been grinning in the TARDIS, looking at everyone gathered round and flying the old girl. That sort of family gathering would not have appealed to the previous regeneration.
Not to mention that Rose would've destroyed the Daleks too, if she had a chance. There weren't many races in the universe of which she would support the utter obliteration, but she'd make an exception for the Daleks, for everything they'd done to the Doctor.
(And to her, but that obviously wasn't nearly as important.)
And she was supposed to do what? Fix him? This new Doctor, a human Doctor? That was the whole point of human nature, surely, that humans make mistakes. She didn't want to think about him as somehow worse than her, or worse than the Time Lord Doctor. Either they were the same person, or they weren't.
She would really have liked them to be the same, but she couldn't believe it. That kiss? That had never happened with the first Doctor. He'd kissed her three times in however many years, and two out of three times she'd been possessed. The third, in Ancient Rome, had never been mentioned again.
But this time... well. She may have initiated it, but she'd been the one to finish it, too.
This aspect of the new Doctor she knew she could get used to, but it just made it that little bit harder to reconcile the two men together. Her Doctor would never have done that.
No, not 'her Doctor'. The Time Lord Doctor. If either one of them was hers, it was the human one.
The one who was still standing right next to her, holding her hand and waiting for her to speak. Damnit, why couldn't he have spoken first?
"Sorry," she blurted out.
Oh, great start.
He frowned in confusion. "What for?"
She was committed to this conversation now, but it took her a second to decide. "Pulling away."
"Well, I'm sorry you did that too, but I understand," he said. "The TARDIS isn't exactly a subtle creature."
She hadn't even thought about that. The TARDIS always seemed to be part of the Doctor. He had a closer relationship with the ship than he did with her, or so it seemed. But more than that, the TARDIS was his... well, his everything. His home, his only reminder of his heritage, of his people. The Doctor was always at his most dangerous when he risked losing the TARDIS, or her, but she rarely got to see that. She was usually imprisoned or something at those points.
"You gonna miss her?" she asked softly.
He looked back at the spot where she had sat regally upon the sand. "Yeah," he said, simply. "But he'll miss you. Neither of us gets everything."
Rose made a little non-committal noise in her throat to avoid commenting. Her mind was too busy.
The way he'd put the TARDIS and her in the same bracket made her feel... she wasn't quite sure. Empowered? Perhaps that was the word. Never had she been sure of his feelings towards her, even though he had just told her, even though she had just kissed him. She was human, when all was said and done; a twenty-first century human girl, barely more than a child when placed next to his centuries of experience, of learning, of life. She'd never really got rid of the idea that she was something a bit like a pet, albeit a special one. A glorified dog, then.
(They still had the terrier at home, though it was now called Rosie to save confusion.)
Now, just in those two sentences, she was suddenly something more. Not an equal. Not in terms of intellect or experience. But maybe an equal in other ways, ways that her teenage self had struggled to see.
Suddenly, all her previous mental agonising ceased to matter. Because they had a whole lifetime to figure it all out. Because this time they really had forever, and 'forever' meant the same thing to both.
A/N: Born because I've read so many awkward fics between the human Doctor and Rose, so I felt the need to write a degree of acceptance. Even if that only came in the last line!