He washed he blood off her hand in ice cold water, but she felt it as burning hot. He frowned when she hissed in pain. "Shouldn't have taken your gloves off."

"Yeah, it was pretty dumb. But it was frustrating, you know?" She watched the pink rush away in the flowing water, trying to think about something other than her hypothermic hands. She shivered instead, full-body tremor that only made his frown deepen. He rummaged through a nearby cupboard and wrapped her in a blanket. She flipped her hand over in the sink.

"Not a very good reason to do something foolish."

"No? You're a "Do as I say" kind of guy, aren't you, Doctor?" She held in a laugh, but he seemed to understand, chuckling aloud. "Certainly. But I'm the Ninth Wonder of the Universe, me." He looked at her with a grin, and she tried to match it, but her teeth chattered together obnoxiously instead, making him frown again.

He lifted the blanket from her and stepped close behind her. "Need to warm you up." He wrapped he blanket around the two of them, only her arms sticking out so that the gradually warming water could do its work. She had to admit she certainly felt warmer with this new arrangement. It started with every point of contact – his chest against her back, his arms over hers, his thumbs lightly moving back and forth over her forearms. And of course where it settled quite inappropriately just below the pit of her stomach. She changed her mind and decided that the discomfort in her hands was exactly where she needed to concentrate.

She figured it was the TARDIS' doing, that the water was warming in small increments, just enough to keep the blood and feeling returning to her finger without burning her frostbitten skin. She really appreciated the old girl sometimes. She'd taken to anthropomorphizing the TARDIS right along with the Doctor, and sometimes she wondered if the TARDIS really could have been as human as they pretended. She swore that once, in the middle of the night, during one of the Doctor's rare bouts of sleep, she had heard the soul of the TARDIS sigh.

She looked down at her fingers, flexing them as she watched. They were moving at near normal speeds now, and she looked at the finger that had been bleeding. Nothing there. No cut. She felt the Doctor's arms tighten around her just slightly and knew that he had seen the same thing. She lifted her hand out of the water, turning and prodding it to see where the cut had disappeared to. There was nothing – not a single mark on her skin. She frowned. "Just a walking miracle, you are," the Doctor breathed from his position behind her, his lips heartbreakingly close to her shoulder. "How do you feel?"

She swallowed. She could, of course, lie and tell him she was still cold, but they would be stolen moments that didn't really mean what she wanted them to. Besides, at some point he would have the TARDIS do a scan of her and the body temperature readout would give her away. "I'm warmed up now, I think." She loosened the blanket around them, giving him room to go. He lingered for a moment. "I suppose we should check on the mauve? See what it is and who's distressed and all that."

"Right. The mauve!" His voice was enthusiastic, and she smiled along with him, but her stomach did a torturous little flip as he slowly drew his hands back up her arms and over her shoulders, gathering the blanket as he did. He bunched the blanket up and left it on the counter. He took her hand and looked at it again before dragging her out to the control room.

She followed him into the control room, slowly, trying to remember the feel of him being closer behind her, while at the same time berating herself for the attempt. There were obviously more important things to attend to.

It lay exactly where he had left it. There were no flashing lights or displays or even visible openings. It was a mauve cylinder. The Doctor turned it over in his hands. "What do you make of it?"

She moved closer and squinted. "Well, what are these?" She traced a line that was etched into the metal, hidden by dents and scratches from its trip through space. Circles and angles in various positions. The Doctor flipped it over to see what she was talking about.

He stared, face full of disbelief. His hands replaced hers, moving gingerly over the lines. "Can't be," he murmured. "It's not possible." He flipped it over again, his fingers moving with familiarity and precision that startled her. A small beeping noise started from within the mauve itself. It grew louder and louder until Miranda had to cover her ears.

He lifted his hand away, now observing the mauve with a mixture of horror and amazement as it opened. There was almost nothing inside of it. Almost. In fact, if Miranda had been the one looking, she would have written it off as an empty tin can. Instead, the Doctor dropped it in shock, catching it only just before it hit the ground. He was trembling now. She noticed, and that was saying something. "What is it, Doctor? I don't see anything inside." He didn't respond, but his fingers traced over shapes etched into the metal, shapes Miranda didn't recognize. Shapes that TARDIS wasn't translating for her. Impossibly old, perhaps, or… "It's Gallifreyan." His voice cracked, and he looked suddenly shy and weak. This little container full of nothing but language was undoing him. She put her hand on his shoulder, unsure of what else to do.

He pulled back, leaving her hand in the air for a long moment. "This shouldn't be here! This shouldn't exist! There's no way!"

"What is it Doctor?"

"It's a distress signal from another Gallifreyan ship."

"Another TARDIS?"

"Yes. And it brought us to earth. But it doesn't have a tracking signal on it."

"What does that mean?"

"It means it wasn't deployed. Something happened. It's essentially space junk, and we just happened to see it."

"Just happened to? That doesn't seem quite possible, Doctor. There are no coincidences, not this big."

"There are coincidences all the time. Haven't you been paying attention? All sorts of things are just eerily similar." His fingers were still tracing over the letters.

"What does it say?"

"It's the name of the ship. The name of the manufacturer. Instructions for whoever finds it."

"So what are we supposed to do?"

He choked, as if his own words bubbling up had constricted his throat. "We do nothing."

"Nothing? How do we do nothing? We found a distress signal from your planet, and we're going to do nothing?"

"There's nothing to DO!" he shouted at her.

Now it was her turn to be quiet. She shied away in the face of his anger – the Oncoming Storm, indeed. "There's nothing to do, Miranda. Don't you understand that? Don't you understand there is no planet to track this back to? There are no ships. There are no Time Lords. There are no more TARDISes. There's just me and this ship alone in the entirety of time and space!" His anger was palpable and it filled the entire cabin. And then it collapsed. A reaction that left only grief in its wake. Her heart broke with his. "There's no one else. This shouldn't be here. There's just me. Gallifrey is gone."

He turned his eyes to her, and she had never seen him so lost. "Gallifrey is gone, and I did it." She knew somehow. He didn't understand, but he saw it in her eyes. Maybe it was from the TV shows she talked about sometimes, but it was there. She knew, or at least he hoped she did. If she didn't know, then at least she understood. She didn't say anything, but she rested her hand on his arm lightly. He slid his arm up, taking her hand in his, clutching them to his chest.

"They were all there one minute. All of them. And then they were gone. The Time Lords. Daleks. All of the evils that both armies had created… They were trampling over each other in the last day of the last Great Time War. And it was going to spread out to the rest of the universe and destroy it. I couldn't let that happen. I couldn't let it destroy everything. I tried to stop… I tried. There was nothing else that could have been done."

She'd never been a very good Catholic growing up, but she did remember confession, and she suddenly felt like the priest. She just didn't know how to give him absolution. "Doctor…" She let him grieve. She didn't say anything more. When he finally put down the container, setting it gently on the console, and took both her hands in his, she welcomed him. She opened her arms and let him fall into them. He didn't cry. She wondered if he was even capable of crying anymore, or if Time Lords ever were. But his breathing was ragged, and it seemed to comfort him to be there with her. To listen to her single strong heartbeat ring his ears. And each breath of hers was smooth and full in contrast to his stuttering half-breaths. Memories were raging through his head, memories he had tried very hard to forget. Now they had followed the container, this piece of space junk, to the last place he called a refuge.

"There's nowhere to go, nothing to look into, nothing to do. There's no way to get to Gallifrey. No way. I don't know that there's anyone else that understands that feeling. To have chosen to sacrifice an entire world."

"To never be able to go home again, because you chose something else." Her words were so soft that she wasn't sure she'd spoken them. She half-hoped they were in her head. She hadn't meant to say them, hadn't meant to compare them, to hold her grief up to his, where it was so thin and pale. But she'd said it, and when his eyes found hers, she regretted it a little less.

"I took you from your world," he said finally.

"No," she said softly. Suddenly desperate to make him understand that he didn't have to carry her choices on his shoulders. "You didn't take me from anywhere. I picked this. Over everything else. I chose this life. I chose life with you, Doctor." She sighed, placing her lips briefly on his forehead. "And I don't regret it."

"I didn't do anything to deserve you. Everything I've done should drive you away screaming."

"And where would I go? There's nowhere in any universe that I would rather be. I don't know if I'll ever make you understand that, but it's true." Her lips brushed against his short hair as she spoke, and he sighed at the feeling. There was a time, after the Moment, that he was sure no one would ever want to touch someone so stained with death again. He didn't even want to be himself. He'd jetted off into the blackness of space. Far away from the dead sun, from the world wrapped in itself, wrapped in its own time, and tried to pretend that he hadn't killed all of them. Tried to pretend that his hand hadn't ended an entire world and more species than most humans could name. He tried to pretend, and when he was finally done pretending, he'd gotten lost.

Lost in another dimension, where he'd picked up a girl who could never understand him. But he realized then that he would never understand her, not really. He realized that he had stolen her home from her – given her an offer that was too good to refuse without explaining the consequences. And she wanted to help him. She wanted to make him feel better. She wanted to take away his pain. He shifted, changing their hold from the maternal comforter to two equals. He caught her eye. "Remind me, again, why you stay."

Her heart froze. There was answer that came immediately, an answer she wanted desperately to give, but didn't think she could. She swallowed it back. It was bitter on the way down. And she tried to find another way to say it, another way that wouldn't put the pressure of those words on him. She fell short. And all she could do was breathe a sigh that he seemed to take into himself. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Thank you, Miranda. Miranda Larsen."

The words of her name sounded new on his lips just then. They sounded like they were meant to say something else that in his head was so linked with her name that it was its own meaning. It gave her hope and made her smile. "I'm not going to leave you alone, you know. No matter what time or space, I'll be there if you need me."

"That's a big promise to make. Bigger than you can possibly keep."

She knew though, she would do everything in her power to keep it. If she could shift galaxies or universes, twist time – she would do it for him. She didn't respond to his challenge, but silently reaffirmed it to herself.

"You're quite the creature, you know that?"

"Quite the creature?"

"A beautiful young girl with all your life ahead of you, but you cling to this crazy old man with a daft old face. To make him feel better."

"That's not why I do it…"

"That's not what I'm saying, Miranda." He held her back from him, enough he could see her face. "I don't know what I'd do right now if I hadn't found you."

"Oh, you'd probably be gallivanting across the universe having picked up a supermodel somewhere."

"Nah, don't need supermodels. Besides, I don't think they'd know nearly as much about the universe and poetry." He kissed her, and she wasn't expecting it. She oscillated for a moment between responding and pulling away. He was obviously only doing this because he was hurt. She shouldn't want this as much as she did. She shouldn't want him as much as she did.

She stopped that thought where it came from. It wasn't something she could say, it wasn't something she could even feel. But she didn't shove him away, and the kiss was so tender and soft that it almost made her cry. Instead she kissed him back. When they parted a moment later, his breathing was ragged and uneven again. There was still too much grief in the air for anything more than that one chaste kiss, but all the same, some kind of barrier had been broken. Some kind of line had been crossed and they both knew it.

She twined her fingers in his. "Come on."

"Where are we going?"

"To the stars."

He'd told her about a protocol that would take her to earth's moon to just circle. A place to think. A place to go in case something went wrong. A safe place where he could recover. She hit that button now. "You should get some rest, Doctor. You didn't get nearly enough." There was fear in his eyes. "I'll be there. I'll do what I can to fight off nightmares, ok?" He squeezed her hand tighter as they wandered back toward the viewing room. He sat on the sofa, laying back, bringing her hand with him, pulling her down to tuck her body up against his in not an entirely new position, but with entirely new meaning.

Tonight was for his dreams, his grief, his memories, and she would do what she could to ward off bad dreams. She wasn't a telepath of course, but she would try. But in the morning when they awoke, their fingers still twined together, and his leg tucked between hers, something had changed, irrevocably. The wall between her universe and his was impenetrable; Gallifrey was gone. And the Doctor would have done anything to never, ever lose her. But as far as that went, he didn't end up with much of a choice.