AN: Thank you to the people who followed or favourited this story! I'm excited for it to actually get going.


The hum of the TARDIS numbed her. For what could have been minutes and what could have been hours Rose sat slumped in the jumpseat, staring at the time rotor and not seeing anything. However long she had waited though, she knew one thing; the Doctor had yet to return. The TARDIS continued to hum a low sound that wasn't distinguishable in any way, but that made her think of funeral marches.

The ugly sobbing of earlier had deceased but silent tears continued to roll down her cheeks and she was fairly certain she had never in her life been such a mess, not that she cared.

The shaking too had abated, but she was well aware that she had yet to recover from the shock; once or twice she had attempted to move, either to fetch water to wash her mouth out with, or just to wander so she was no longer stationary, but no matter how much she thought about moving, her body never listened, and she remained where she was, and waited.

The Doctor was trapped and gone, and so was her mother and Mickey, and hell, even Pete's World Pete. She was alone, and for the first time in many years, Rose felt loneliness seep into her bones. The last time she had felt such a way was back in the days of Jimmy Stone. She thought of the name, and the face to go with it, with a sneer of disgust, and told herself to think of different things - but what was there to think about? Her best friend was gone. No one to talk to.

Silence reigned on the good ship TARDIS and outside, the world continued to turn.


The Doctor had only one thing on his mind; getting back to his own universe. Back to his TARDIS, back to Rose. Both of them must have felt so lonely without him. At least as lonely as he felt at the moment. A terrible part of him wondered whether the TARDIS would die without her pilot and oldest friend there anymore, and he hoped against hope that she wouldn't. One way or another, rules of the multiverse be damned, he would be getting home again, and when he did he would need his Old Girl.

Resisting the push he felt against the back of his eyes, the Doctor shook himself and doubled his concentration. He stared down at his calculations, scribbled on the three whiteboards before him and on the pages upon pages of paper from over the last five days. Stopping himself from looking at the fourth whiteboard in the corner of the room, now with a hole punched through the middle, his brain continued to power on.

It had been a shocking fit of anger that wrecked the fourth whiteboard, and if he were able to care properly in the moment, he would have been angry with himself. He had thought he was so close to an answer -

Shaking his head and muttering, "Come on, Doctor," he forced his thoughts away from his failure and concentrated on all his other working theories. There had to be something. There just had to be.

At least Pete's World had its own Torchwood, though any mention of the name made firey hot molasses rage through his veins. It was their facilities he used, and the fact that the whiteboard had been a Torchwood whiteboard had made him feel some small degree of satisfaction when a stray magnetic weight went sailing through it the day before.

There was a tentative knock on the door. The Doctor ignored it. The knock sounded again. He ignored it again.

"Hey, boss, mind if I come in?" Mickey the Idiot. Lovely.

Pushing down a sneer, he grunted, and the sound of approaching footsteps made his insides clench up despite knowing they weren't hostile. He reminded himself not to lash out, because that certainly wouldn't help.

"Jackie wants you to take a break, boss." Mickey had developed a habit of calling him "boss" a lot when he was nervous. The last time they had spoken, three days ago in that very room, the Doctor had counted twenty one "bosses" before giving up the count. The conversation had lasted about two minutes.

Mickey pressed on when he didn't answer. "She thinks you need to rest, or eat or something."

"Or something?" he repeated flatly, and his voice was somewhat gravelly from lack of recent use. Never before had the Doctor been so quiet. If Rose had been there, she might have found it funny. Made a joke. Something to make him crack a smile or a laugh, and make him believe that somehow, he would get them home.

Was it awful of him to wish that if he was going to be trapped like this at all, that it happened with her at his side?

"She wants you to come home, Doctor." He heard the irritation in Mickey's voice then, and grit his teeth against it.

"That's what I'm trying to do, Mickey," he said, barely refraining from snapping. "Getting myself home." To the TARDIS, Rose, his own world.

"That's not what I meant," Mickey snapped back. "You know what I meant. Back to the manor."

That was where he was staying. Jackie had moved straight into Pete's mansion and had insisted that he went with her, because, "You ain't sleeping on no park bench while I have anything to say about it, mister!"

He had initially resisted, insisting that as a Time Lord with superior physiology he didn't have to sleep nearly as much as humans, but all that had earned him was further insistence and a look from the woman that suggested she wanted to slap him. Even in his - emotionally compromised state, his self preservation was there to stop this coming to pass, and he had accepted she and Pete's offer with the most sincere thanks he could muster up at the time.

That didn't mean he actually had to go there, however, and after the first, dreadful night, where he had paced up and down in the guest room he had been given like a caged animal, he hadn't set foot in the place. Pete and Mickey had vouched for him at Pete's World Torchwood, and that was where he had been ever since.

"D'you think Rose is okay?" Mickey's subdued question had the Doctor stopping short, stiffening where he sat and drawing his lips into a thin line.

"I don't know." He hoped against hope that she was.

"But what's she gonna do? She's all alone over there."

Not alone, he thought. She has the TARDIS. "I know she is," he bit out.

"What's she gonna do?"

How the hell should he know? "How the hell should I know?"

Mickey huffed at that and stormed out, and the Doctor was left in silence once again. He didn't even have it in him to feel relieved as Mickey's final question rolled around in his head.

What was Rose going to do?


The sound of boots clomping against the floor outside startled Rose back into reality from her dazed position on the jumpseat. She whipped around to stare at the doors of the TARDIS, and jumped out of her skin when a clattering sound rang out, followed by a mingle of voices as people spoke to each other in low voices, too mumbled for her to make anything out.

She had been sat waiting for the Doctor for - five hours. It was nighttime. He still wasn't back. Because he isn't coming back, a voice in her head hissed, and she glowered at nothing and snapped back, "Shut up." The TARDIS hummed lowly, in a warning manner, just before the sounds outside grew closer, and she realised that she had to do something.

After France, after Reinette, Rose had insisted he teach her at least the very basics. It had been her own way of venting her frustrations with the situation, after he had gone crashing through that stupid time window and she had been left waiting hours for him to return with Mickey making irritating remarks in her ear the entire time. Even then, she remembered him saying to her later, radiating smugness, "He only came back as soon as he did thanks to luck. How long would we have waited for him without that fireplace? But he didn't think about that, did he?"

Rose had pursed her lips and told him to shove off because she didn't want to hear it, and right in the present moment, staring down at the console as sounds of life began to grow louder outside, she loathed to think of it even more.

"I need to know," she insisted, and he continued to make noises of dissent and avoid her eyes as he moved around the console. She screwed up her courage and persisted. "Look, Doctor, I don't want - I don't expect you to teach me how to fly her perfectly or something, but if anything ever happened and me and Mickey were stranded somewhere without -" Without you, she finished in her head. Wincing and taking a breath, she said, "I need to at least know how to get us home if something awful happened."

Finally, he looked up from the console, where he was fiddling with one of the hundreds of non-descript buttons, and met her eyes. His own were flat and expressionless, and he sounded as such when he said, "Okay."

Jumping at the sudden banging noise that came from somewhere surely close by, Rose shot into action, determined that no one should know she was there, with the TARDIS. What sort of people came to clean up after something like Canary Wharf? She thought back for a moment to Downing Street, and to UNIT, before one final crashing noise had her rushing to take herself into the vortex.

The TARDIS hummed in a manner she couldn't decipher as she worked, more slowly than the Doctor ever had, and she finalised by pulling the dematerialisation lever. Watching the time rotor begin to move up and down with a hammering heart, she felt herself relax marginally for the first time in hours as the TARDIS wheezed and groaned, and then she groaned herself as the sound made her tear up once again.

Moving slowly around to the monitor, she took a glance - and then a double take as she realised that the words on it were English. She had never seen them in anything other than Gallifreyan and as she understood it, that was the only language it displayed. She almost wanted to laugh when she remembered the Doctor - her last Doctor - explaining to her, "She's the single most powerful ship in the entire universe, Rose. Why would she want to use a language as primitive as English?" in that way he did that managed to be dismissive and yet somehow not really offensive at the same time.

Laughing a watery laugh, she glanced up at the time rotor as the TARDIS hummed again, this time sounding commiseratory. She couldn't help but shoot the ship a weak smile; she supposed she wouldn't be completely alone as long as she had the TARDIS. As if she knew what Rose was thinking, the ship hummed again.

"Thanks girl," she whispered, voice destroyed by hours of crying and screaming at the void. She concentrated on the monitor again and saw that she had succeeded in getting them into the vortex. The thought managed to relax her somewhat, and she decided to stay where she was for a while longer.

Walking away from the monitor again, she looked around the console room and froze up at the sight of the Doctor's brown overcoat, slung over one of the coral struts by the door, where it always was when not with him. Rushing to pick it up, she clutched it to herself and hated herself when the first sob forced its way out of her throat. Without another pause, she retreated to her bedroom, coat in arms, and flung herself onto her bed, the horror of the day finally catching up with her as she fell into a restless sleep.


The TARDIS wouldn't stop humming at her.

It wasn't the usual sort of background noise that Rose would fall asleep to after a long day's adventuring, no. It was pointed, at her to be specific, and if she didn't know better, she would say the ship was trying to nudge her into some sort of action. What action could she take, though? There was nothing she could do. With the Doctor, maybe she was halfway capable, but without him… Well, she often thought back to last Christmas with a cringe, hearing herself bemoan her uselessness.

"There's no one to save us now. Not anymore."

A spark of irritation shot through her at the memory, and she almost wanted to go back and slap herself in the face for her lack of faith and tell her to pull herself together. She thought, with a humourless huff of laughter, that she was one of the only people in the universe who could actually do just that.

The TARDIS hummed loudly again and she groaned, lifting her head up from her pillow to squint up at the ceiling.

"What do you want, eh?" she croaked. "Just leave me."

Her arms remained wrapped around the brown long coat she had clung to for the last few - days? Time didn't really exist on the TARDIS, but she couldn't deny the length of time she had spent wallowing when she actually acknowledged to herself how terribly hungry she was. At one point, she had fetched herself a glass of water in a halfhearted effort to not dehydrate, but that was it. The glass sat empty on her bedside table.

At her last remark, the TARDIS hummed indignantly and the lights to her bedroom shot on at full beam. She cried out and buried her head into the pillow.

"Fine!" she cried. "I'm getting up! You hear me?" The lights dimmed at that so she assumed the ship had indeed heard, and with a groan she pushed herself up and to her feet.

The coat, she considered taking with her, but suddenly she felt as if she couldn't look at it for another second without getting back into bed, and so she left it crumpled there, and consequently left the comforting smell of the Doctor behind as she trudged out into the hall.

Leaning back against the closed door, Rose closed her eyes and tried to think clearly, for the first time in what she accepted had been days.

The walls of reality were closed, he said. There was no chance of passage between them, ever again. Rose understood this, and accepted that the Doctor knew infinitely better than she did. She also knew that it wasn't possible for a human to absorb the time vortex and survive. True, the action hadn't been without consequence - and thinking of her old friend with his silly ears and his leather jacket, her heart ached again - but it had happened. Somehow, she would make this happen too.

With a decisive nod to herself and one last moment of sadness, she screwed up her might into a compact and metaphorical ball, and marched off towards the library - only to detour to the kitchen when the TARDIS kept putting it in front of her.

She supposed she could take the time to eat something before her work began. Combing through every book the library held on inter-universe travel would be hungry work, after all.