Rolling over Rose was hardly surprised to find the other side of the bed empty. Needing only about half the sleep most humans needed the Doctor was routinely up and about before Rose was. So as not to risk disturbing her sleep the Doctor had taken to slipping out of bed and moving into their spare room, which these days looked more like a workshop than a bedroom, to work on one project or another. Rolling onto her back she wondered what projects the Doctor had brought with him to occupy his time while they were stuck at her parents'.

Even after several months in this universe the Doctor still hadn't officially gotten himself a job, not that it was really necessary for him to find one right away. Rose had a fairly decent salary from Torchwood and they had managed to find a pretty nice and decent flat that was well within their means and neither Rose nor the Doctor had a lot of expenses other than the basics.

This isn't to say that the Doctor just lounged around and did nothing all day, he could most days be found in his workshop tinkering with something or in somebody else's flat in the building tinkering away. It hadn't taken long in their new building for the Doctor to establish himself as the go to fix-it guy. T.V. on the fritz, AC not working just right, computer acting up, just ring up the good ol' Doc he'll get you sorted out in no time they said. The building supper had wasted no time in enlisting the Doctor's help around the place and while no the Doctor wasn't officially on the building's maintenance payroll the Sup did usually knock fifty to a hundred pounds off their rent every month depending on the work the Doctor did so Rose wasn't in a huge rush to nag the Doctor about finding a 'real' job.

The door to Torchwood of course was wide open if the Doctor ever decided to walk through it, but somehow Rose didn't think that he ever would. Even knowing that this universe's Torchwood was leaps and bounds different from the one in their universe, she just couldn't picture him being content to work in a place that conjured up the emotions and memories that Torchwood did.

Although when the time did come and the Doctor decided that he needed to buckle down and get a serious job and start really contributing Rose had it in mind to steer him towards something in the education field. Seeing the way he was with other people in the building (not just fixing their things but showing them how) and from first hand experience Rose knew how easy the Doctor made learning, he was a natural born teacher.

For all intents and purpose the Doctor appeared content with the way his life was going, but Rose couldn't help the nagging feeling whispering in the back of her mind these day? There was a heaviness hanging about the Doctor lately and if Rose were honest with herself she would admit that she'd been burying her head in the sand about it, until the Doctor's impromptu road trip had forced her to look up and take notice. Now she couldn't help but notice that the Doctor was restless and withdrawn. She wished that he would talk to her about whatever it was that was bothering him, but didn't want to push him out of fear - fear that the Doctor had finally decided that he couldn't do domestics after all and that if she pushed him she would wake up one morning and find him gone from her life for good. Rose was terrified that the life, the future she'd begun envisioning for herself and the Doctor was slipping through her fingers and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Glancing at the clock on the nightstand, with a sigh, Rose was surprised to see that it was only just a little past 4am. Yes the Doctor was an early riser but even this was a little excessive for him and judging by how cold his side of the bed was he'd been gone for a while before she'd woken up. With a frown Rose threw the covers back and slid from her nice warm bed to go in search of her wayward doctor.

Finished searching his normal haunts upstairs Rose made her way downstairs to continue her search for the Doctor. Deciding to start with the kitchen Rose paused at seeing that the back sliding door was partially open. Cautiously Rose made her way over to the door and peeked out, surprised to see not only the Doctor but also her mother sitting side by side on one of the benches.

"She's pregnant isn't she?"

Hearing those words come out of her mother's mouth made Rose stop dead in her tracks.

"Yeah...yeah she is. Don't think she's made that realization yet though at least not that she's told me."

Immediately without much conscious thought Rose laid a hand on her stomach 'how did they?' She'd only just started to have suspicions herself and in fact had 'get a pregnancy test' at the top of her to do list for the next day. Rose of course hadn't told anyone else in case it was a false alarm, so how had both the Doctor and her mother figured it out before her?

"You don't sound overly thrilled."

"What…? No of course-."

"Don't lie to me Doctor."

Rose watched with bated breath as the Doctor slumped his shoulders, let out a loud sigh, then ran a hand through his hair.

"Jackie I love Rose, I do with every beat of my heart, you know that and I'll love this child too. I'm not going anywhere if that's what you're afraid of. I just….I know I should be feeling thrilled, ecstatic, over the moon with joy…."

"But you don't."

"No, I don't."

Those three words just about crushed Rose. Sure they hadn't planned on having a child, had never even discussed the possibility of children, but once the idea that she might maybe be pregnant with the child of the man she loved had entered into her head Rose had swelled up with happiness and love. To hear that the Doctor didn't feel the same way broke Rose's heart, there was no way she was going to get rid of the child, but she didn't want the Doctor to feel forced into something that he didn't want.

"I want to Jackie, Rassilon I want to...but I just can't let myself. All I can think of, the only thing going through my head is 'What if I do it again? What if I hurt my family again?' it just keeps playing over and over in my head."

"You would never hurt them. You couldn't-"

Rose jumped when the Doctor suddenly burst out of his seat and whirled around on Jackie anger flashing in his eyes.

"Don't, don't you dare sit there and tell me I couldn't hurt my family, that I'm not capable! Because you know what Jackie that's exactly what I am! I am more than capable, I've done it before so what's to say that I won't again? I had a family, a wife, children, hell even grandchildren, back on Gallifrey and you know what happened? I killed them, I murdered every last one of them in cold blood right along with the rest of my people-"

Tears running down her face Rose watched as the Doctor with tears of his own crumpled under the weight of his burdens. She couldn't take it anymore seeing him kneeling there on the ground chest heaving as if he couldn't get enough air, tears flowing.

Pushing her way through the door Rose was at once at the Doctor's side wrapping him in her arms. "Shh...it's alright I've got you."

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." Immediately the Doctor clutched Rose tightly as if afraid that she'd suddenly vanish. "I don't know how you could ever love or trust me-."

"I do with every fiber of my being." There was no doubt only conviction in Rose's voice. "You're not a cold blooded killer or this wouldn't be affecting you so badly. You're just a man who was forced to make an impossible choice in an impossible situation. I've never feared for my life from you and I never will with our child's either."

Never releasing her hold on him Rose shifted them around so that she was sitting cross legged with the Doctor's head laying in her lap. The Doctor couldn't seem to form any more words he was so choked up with emotions, so he just clung tighter to Rose and buried his head deeper into her lap like a frightened child trying to hide from the world.

Rose had no idea how long they sat there like that in the grass, it was long enough though for her to have dozed lightly. She startled slightly when a large blanket was settled over them. Glancing up she saw her mother standing there holding a finger to her lips. Glancing back down Rose could see that the Doctor was still awake, but completely oblivious to the world around him, a far off haunted look in his eyes. Looking back up at her mother Rose silently pleaded for her to tell her what to do, how to fix this.

Leaning down Jackie placed a loving kiss to the top of her daughter's head and whispered, "you love him and you fight when he can't, you fight the demons with everything you have. You show him everyday that he really is the man you think he his. You keep being the guiding light in his world that keeps the despair from consuming him. And in time with you by his side he'll start to see in himself what you see and be able to love himself again."

Nodding her head Rose once again looked down at the man laying in her lap. Leaning forward she ran a hand through his hair and whispered softly in his ear. The Doctor, haunted look still in his eyes, loosened his grip slightly and offered no resistance as Rose pulled them both up to their feet. Wrapping the blanket around the Doctor, Rose snaked an arm around his waist and led him back into the house.

Jackie watched the two of them go hoping and praying that she'd said the right things. They were a long way off from being ok but maybe now after tonight they could finally truly start the healing process and stop tap dancing around some of the bigger issues that needed dealing with.

Entering their room Rose guided the Doctor to sit on the bed. It worried Rose how little participation the Doctor offered as she crouched down to quickly pull his shoes off and then strip him out of his sweaty running clothes so that he sat there in just his boxers. He was acting more like a doll than a living human being and Rose had no idea how to snap him out of his current state. So wrapped up in her own thoughts it startled Rose when the Doctor suddenly clutched her in his arms as she settled them both back into bed. Snaking an arm around her waist the Doctor rested his head on her chest and clung to Rose as a drowning man would a life preserver.

Lying there curled up with Rose the Doctor could feel that unscratchable itch starting to form under his skin again. Cold tendrils of panic began clawing at him and he just wished it would stop, but he didn't know how to make it do so. He'd finally reached a point where he'd felt like he'd started to make peace with his past and could start a new future with Rose, but the moment he'd felt that tiny spark of life and fully realized what it was and what it meant everything had come crashing back down on him and it was like being back at square one.

"Stop it." Rose ordered as she ran her fingers through the Doctor's hair. "Just breathe, you're gonna get yourself all worked up again."

"Rose I don't know if I….what if I can't do this? What if I'm a lousy father with all this baggage I'm carrying around? I don't want to screw this up." Words started rushing out of the Doctor like water from a leaky faucet.

"Hey, hey slow down." Rose comforted. "You won't be lousy, you're great with kids. Tony and all of his little friends adore you and remember the incident with the Isolus I saw the way you were with Chloe and a little birdie once told me about how you treated and handled those war orphans when we went back to 1941."

"That's different," the Doctor protested.

"How so?"

"They weren't my children. I wasn't responsible for raising them. They didn't depend on me to support them, provide for them-."

"Again slow down." Rose dropped a gentle kiss to the back of his head. "You know you might very well be getting worked up over nothing we don't even know for sure that I am pregnant-"

"You are." The udder conviction in the Doctor's voice as he moved to lay a hand on her stomach made Rose pause.

"How can you be so certain?"

"Because I can feel it when we bond. There's this tiny, fragile, precious ember of life burning away in the back of my mind…." The Doctor paused taking a deep breath. "... It's something I've felt before back in my younger days. Remember I told you that there was a mental component to Time Lord reproduction?" Rose gave a soft hum of confirmation once again running her fingers through his hair. "From the moment the Looming process begins we can feel our children come into existence, feel them grow into these precious beings….All of my children….I felt….Rassilon, Rose to be a part of that…."

"Shh….shh…." Rose leaned forward to rest her forehead against the back of the Doctor's head trying to help sooth him. She didn't like the way his breathing was starting to hitch and didn't want him to start hyperventilating.

"I'm sorry…." The Doctor whispered sometime later.

"For what?" Rose was caught off guard, not knowing what he could possibly be apologizing for.

"For getting you pregnant, for not even considering it was a possibility."

"Don't. Don't you ever be sorry about this." Rose tightened her hold on the Doctor. "Because I'm not. I know we didn't plan this, never even discussed children, but it's happened and I have no regrets, I couldn't be happier."

"You're happy about this?"

"You're not." Rose really wished that the Doctor would look at her, but knew him well enough to know that if he were to get through this emotional conversation without shutting down, running away, he needed to maintain a certain detachment and hiding his face, not meeting her eyes was the only way he could do that.

"It's….it's not that I'm not happy….I just….I'm just having a hard time coming to terms with the thought that I'm going to be a father again. It never occurred to me that we would be compatible enough for this to happen. Time Lord reproduction is just so complex, that while not entirely impossible, it is extremely difficult to procreate with other species, not without a lot of medical intervention anyway - intervention that Earth's current medical level couldn't provide." The Doctor stalled a moment trying to put his thoughts into some semblance of order. "As the last of the Time Lords I had to give up on the idea of children ever being a part of my life again. Children just became a vague notion, a vague concept that happened to other people, but not to me, never again to me. Physically I may be mostly human but mentally….my mind is all Time Lord, I still think and process like a Time Lord so discovering that after all this time of thinking that I'd never be a father again, that I can in fact be a father again has thrown me for a loop. I'm having a hard time processing it all, but I am processing just be patient with me please."

"Of course." Rose felt some of the tension easy out of her. She decided to ask him a question that had been forming in the back of her mind. "When….when did you first feel our child?"

"Not sure six maybe seven weeks ago." the Doctor shrugged. "I've spent a lot of time being in denial, thought I was imagining it at first, just a figment of my imagination, but I kept feeling it, feeling it steadily grow stronger."

"Why didn't you say something?"

"Denal, panic, terror take your pick."

"Six weeks." Rose whispered softly almost to herself. "That's right around the time you took off on your impromptu road trip."

"Yeah, everything just came to a head. It all just came crashing in on me, I had to get out, needed to be on the move. I guess running has always been my default coping mechanism."

Rose couldn't deny that, couldn't come up with the words to dissuade him of that notion because it was true, absolutely true - the Doctor in the past had always chosen to run rather than face his emotions. Rose couldn't begrudge the Doctor his coping mechanism though, after all she'd been known to do her fair share of running in the past especially when she'd first been stranded in Pete's World. Right then and there Rose made a silent vow that there would be no more running for either of them. She was going to do as her mother had said and fight, fight like she'd never fought before to prove to the Doctor that he was a better man than he gave himself credit for.

"Can I ask you something?" Rose asked some time later. The Doctor still wouldn't look at her, but he had started to trace a very familiar pattern on her stomach. Even though she didn't know how to decipher the pattern into words she'd understand it still made her shiver inside knowing what it represented and that the Doctor trusted her enough to share it with her.

"Anything."

"If it honestly never occurred to you that you might be able to have children again why did it worry you when you thought we hadn't used any protection after our first time together?"

That question brought the Doctor up short causing him to studder in his pattern making. It wasn't that he didn't have an answer he just wasn't sure how to phrase it without sounding like an idiot. "I just kind of assumed that, that was something you would have expected me to be worried about. That 'you must always use protection during sex' was one of those unwritten rules that you humans all live by, like don't eat food out of jars with your fingers or you know don't randomly lick things. I'm living a human life now on a human world I need to learn to start playing by human rules. So that's why I brought it up, not because I was actually worried about anything but because I thought that's what I was supposed to do."

Rose couldn't help the small smile that crept up at the corner of her mouth, kind of glad the Doctor wasn't looking at her right then - wouldn't do to have him think she was laughing at him. "Well you're partially right, although it's 'should use protection' not must. It's not a mandatory thing, lots of people foolishly don't but it's their choice. Not only does it reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancies it also greatly reduces your chances of getting an STD. Though that second one wasn't ever really a worry for us, I know I'm clean and since you've never had sex with anyone but me it's a pretty good bet that you are too."

"Oh," yep he was an idiot, he didn't know how Rose ever put up with him. "You must think I'm the biggest idiot. How I must disappoint you, 'look at the Doctor, look at the once mighty Time Lord, see how far he's fallen-."

"Stop that right now and look at me." Rose was not going to lay there and listen to the Doctor tear himself down. The Doctor shut up but didn't move. "Doctor please…."

Hearing the desperation in Rose's voice the Doctor knew he couldn't resist and soon found himself laying on his side face to face with Rose.

"Now listen to me, you are not an idiot." She gently cupped the side of his face and punctuated the statement with a kiss to his forehead. "And I'm certainly not disappointed in you for not knowing how to be human. For all of the time that you spent on Earth and around humans, Earth and humanity are not your culture, not your heritage so why should you be expected to know every little minute detail about it? Think of it this way if our positions were reversed and I'd suddenly found myself mostly Time Lord and living on Gallifrey, would you be disappointed with me because I didn't know how to be a Time Lord?"

"No of course not. Gallifreyan culture is very complex I would never expect someone who'd been human their whole life to be able to fully integrate….oh right point made." The Doctor glanced down sheepishly.

"Good now will you promise me that from now on if you find yourself unsure of something about being human that you'll talk to me about it and not just react the way you think I'd want you to."

"Yeah, yeah I think I can do that."

"Right well I don't know about you but I could really use some sleep, it's been a long night." Rose adjusted her position so that she could rest comfortably with her head on the Doctor's shoulder, arm thrown over his chest.

"Sleep, yeah that sounds good." The Doctor wrapped the arm of the shoulder Rose was lying on around her shoulders and brought his other hand up to rest on top of the one Rose had on his chest.