Disclaimer: Sadly, I have no claim on Doctor Who and make no profit from it.
Some plot points and bits of dialogue respectfully borrowed from the episode "Partners in Crime" by Russell T Davies. With apologies to Donna Noble, who I'm sure will find the Doctor someday, just not today.
The Doctor checked his reflection in the glass of the security door, straightening his tie and smoothing his wind-blown hair, before sonicking his way inside the headquarters of Adipose Industries. He noted with some detachment that there was a bit of a spring in his step as he moved down the corridor. He had sometimes been accused of having a morbid glee when facing disasters, but he knew that wasn't quite true. It wasn't that he enjoyed danger for its own sake. Partly it was that having a problem to solve, lives to save, made him feel that his own life still had meaning and purpose. And partly it was that the wave of adrenaline made him feel alive, lifted the detritus of his soul: the loneliness and the guilt and the sorrow that sometimes threatened to crush him. When the wave eventually ebbed, the flotsam would settle back down, but there was always the hope that some small piece of it would have been carried away.
With a companion, he was content to be still, to enjoy the quiet moments of life: to gaze for hours at the frozen seascape of Woman Wept, or to watch the triple moonrise over the mountains of Kindala. But alone, he needed to stay in motion, to fill the void inside his head and his hearts. And he was alone again now. Martha, kind, brave, clever Martha, had saved his life, saved the whole world, and then left him, gone home to pick up the pieces of her life. In a way, he thought that her loss stung more than Rose's, because it had been of her own volition. He probed that thought for a moment, poking at it like a tongue at a sore tooth, and then changed his mind. No, losing Rose was definitely worse.
The thing that by turns frustrated and fascinated him was that he had never actually offered Rose any more than he had offered Martha. More fool, me. And yet, unlike Martha, Rose had never tired of waiting for him to come around. She had promised him forever; she had even chosen him over her own family until the choice had been literally pulled from her grasp. She had been content to wait patiently, never pushing him for more than he was comfortable in giving. More fool, her. But no, he caught himself, he didn't mean that, not about his Rose. Occasionally foolish, yes, but never a fool.
Because, as she had somehow instinctively seemed to understand, if she had pushed him…well, he imagined that at the time, it would have sent him running in the opposite direction. He had been so damaged, so shattered, so doubtful that he could bring anything to a relationship besides the promise of adventures in the TARDIS. Come to that, he was still damaged and doubtful. But now that he knew what it was to live without Rose, if he could cross his own timeline and start all over again, he couldn't imagine wasting a moment of that second chance.
These thoughts carried him up several flights of stairs. At every landing, he poked his head out of the stairwell door, until finally on the fourth floor he found a promising prospect: rows of cubicles filled with sales reps pitching their goods. He strode confidently down the aisle – he had long since learned that a confident stride would carry him nearly as far as the psychic paper – and stopped at a cube containing a young woman. He flashed the psychic paper at her as he slid into the spare seat, and whispered over her phone spiel, "John Smith, Health and Safety. Don't mind me."
She was just wrapping up a call, and turned to him questioningly when it was done, but he waved a dismissive hand at her. "No, really, carry on. I'm just here to observe." He sat attentively through her next pitch about the science behind the pills and the money-back guarantee and the easy payment installments and the bonus offer of a gold pendant. "That pendant," he told her as soon as she ended the call, "I'll need one for a sample."
She slid open a drawer to reveal a heap of white cardboard jewelry boxes. "Take anything you'd like. Is there…something else I can do for you?"
He slipped one of the boxes into his pocket, wondering why her face-to-face voice seemed an octave lower than her phone voice and why she was batting her eyelashes like that. Perhaps she had something in her eye. He opened his mouth to ask, but he seemed to hear Rose's voice in his head, whispering Rude, so he changed it to, "A copy of your customer list would be lovely, yeah."
She looked vaguely disappointed. "We have a million customers in the London area."
He waved airily. "Oh, I think just a hundred random names would be fine. Where is the printer?" She pointed across the aisle, and he flashed her a brilliant smile. "Right, then, if you could just print off the list, I'll be out of your hair." He stood, but she was pressing a slip of paper into his hand. "What's this?"
"My telephone number."
He was completely baffled. "What for?"
"Health and Safety. You be Health, I'll be Safety," she replied with a seductive wink.
Suddenly, the voice and the eyelashes made sense. Humans and their ridiculous mating rituals. He nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to escape to the printer, gabbling about protocols and regulations as he went.
He was pulling the last sheet off of the printer when a voice caught his attention, one as familiar as his own because it once had been his own. His keen hearing caught the Northern-accented words, "John Smith, Health and Safety. We just have a few questions for you." He stole my alias! Well, I say stole, technically it was his first, but I was first here at Adipose. He looked around, seeking the source of the voice, and then he saw them at the far end of the floor, speaking to someone who was probably the sales manager in the door of her office.
He studied the trio of faux health agents. There was the ninth version of himself, complete with leather jacket and daft ears; it was strange to see himself from the back. Next to Nine was a shorter, dark-haired man who seemed vaguely familiar; but the Doctor couldn't waste time trying to place him, because his gaze had already moved on to what was surely the most glorious sight in the universe – in any universe. He couldn't see her face from where he stood, but he would know that thick golden hair, that lithe form, anywhere. For a moment, all he could do was drink in the sight of her; it wasn't until he felt his respiratory bypass kick in that he realized he had forgotten even to breathe. He sent a silent plea for her to turn around, but as she started to do so, he panicked and dove for the relative safety of the cubicle he had just left.
His would-be date looked up, startled by his sudden reappearance. He gave her a smile that was meant to be winning but in reality was probably closer to sickly. "Uh, you see," he groped for a reason for his return, "Well…It just occurred to me that regulations are meant to be broken." Her eyes widened and she smiled, but gestured to her headset to indicate that she was on another call. "Oh, carry on, take your time." It was fine with him if she took all day. He needed a few moments to sort out his racing thoughts.
He wasn't quite sure why his instinct had been to hide from Rose. He was from her future, so there was no way that she, or even Nine himself, would recognize him. But then he thought about the naked longing that she would have seen written across his face, and knew he had made the right call. She would not have known who he was, but she would have known that something was off with him. Rose being Rose, she would have wanted to investigate. And he knew he could not have faced her compassionate inquiries, not without blurting out the whole story and possibly bursting into tears to boot. So that was settled, then – he had to avoid Rose at all costs while they were both here at Adipose.
Which raised the question of what she and the Ninth Doctor were doing at Adipose in the first place – he was sure he had never been here before. He risked a peek over the top of the cubicle. Rose had her back to him again, but the other man was looking around. The Doctor took a sharp breath as he recognized the face. That idiot from Van Statten's museum – Adam something, wasn't it? Now he was truly confused. He would have sworn that Platform Five was the only place he had taken Adam before unceremoniously dumping him at home in 2012. There was only one reason that this visit to Adipose Industries would be missing from his vast recollection – he must have intentionally blocked the memories. And why he would have felt the need to do that was a source of concern.
He supposed that he really should just walk away right now. That would be the safest course – move on, let Nine handle things. Less chance of awkward encounters and damage to the space-time continuum. Maybe ancient Rome would be a good next stop. But a large part of his psyche was insisting that this was his find, his alien signal to track. Let Nine find another adventure. He's got Rose – I've got only this. Even in his own ears this sounded alarmingly like a child on the verge of a tantrum, but he couldn't quite bring himself to care. Besides, he reasoned, if Nine blocked the memories, that means he had seen his future, which probably means he had met up with me. So really, if he left now, he would be altering his own past, whereas by seeing this through, he was just assuring that his personal history would stay on the course that had already been set. He smiled smugly at the circuitous reasoning that allowed him to do exactly as he wanted in the first place. And then there was the small voice that whispered, Plus, if you stay, you might accidentally run into Rose in a way that is totally unavoidable and completely not your fault. He quashed that little voice as firmly as he could – the chance of seeing Rose again was absolutely, positively probably not much of a factor in his decision.
It gradually dawned on him that the sales rep had finished her call and was looking expectantly at him for the answer to a question that he hadn't heard. "I'm sorry, what was that?"
"I asked what you were doing tonight."
"Oh!" He chanced another peek over the cube and saw that the others had stepped into the manager's office. Now was the time to make a break for it. "Well, you know, as I was sitting here, it dawned on me how much I like my job and how foolish it would be to risk it on a fling, however tempting. Coward, me. Ta!" he called as he bolted for the stairs.
His steps slowed once he was safely in the stairwell. Seeing Rose, even for such a brief moment, had been amazing, but it had also broken open a wound that had only just begun to heal. He imagined that this was what an addict felt after falling off the wagon: the momentary rush of the old familiar drug, then the daunting prospect of going through withdrawal all over again. He sighed and plunged his hands into his pockets, where his fingers encountered the jewelry box. Just what the doctor ordered, he decided, directing his steps toward the TARDIS. Focusing his mind on scientific investigation would surely distract him from the loneliness.
It didn't. Oh sure, his genius brain was able to tease out the secrets of the circuitry hidden in the pendant. It was a bio-flip digital switch, molecularly engineered to key itself to an individual, and he had a good suspicion of what its activation would do, although he would still need to talk with some Adipose customers to confirm it. But it was when, out of long habit, he began to explain these findings aloud, and then looked up to realize he was alone, that the full weight of his isolation crashed in on him. He braced himself on the console, bowed his head, and let the tears fall for the first time since the aborted farewell at Bad Wolf Bay.