You don't know where we are, do you?" she said, giggling. He stepped away, reluctant and awkward in every step. She grabbed him by the arm before he got too far.

"I wouldn't say that," he responded, and scratched his nose. "It's not that I don't know."

She smiled at him. He looked back at her and his gaze softened. She loved when he did that. "What is it then?" she asked.

He took a deep breath. "It's that I'm not…sure."

"We are so lost," she said. The Doctor went to retort, but she shut him up with a finger. "You can say it, y'know? We are lost. Pretending we're not isn't going to help us be less lost."

He got quiet for a moment. His eyes turned from a general concern to a meek sadness she couldn't recognise. He stared at her silently, his entire attitude relaxing. "I'm not lost, Rose."

"Another one," the Doctor said. "All dead."

This had been the eight planet that they had gone on today, all in vain. The planets were all dead, undiscovered, or downright poisonous to stay on. They had found nothing. Not a soul, not a whisper.

"Blimey," was all that Corin could mutter. They'd had bad luck before, but never like this. The TARDIS would intervene, usually, but he guessed she wasn't feeling up to it today. Or she was really, really angry with him. Despite not hearing or feeling a thing she gave out, the flickering lights or the sudden doorknob disappearing did the trick to convey her feelings.

They were, in nearly none of its technicalities, stuck.

She tried to walk past it. She really did. She went back to the threshold and took a double-take, but her eyes hadn't deceived her.

Corin was cooking. Based on the frequent tshhk s and the movement of his arm, he was cutting something up. She stared at him, simply not being able to believe it. The most he had ever done was throw something in the oven and burn toast with his neo-toasters.

It was an odd sight, to say the least.

He must've felt her stare because he froze for a few seconds before turning around. He held her judgmental gaze for a few seconds before his face turned red and he looked away. "What?" he asked weakly.

"You're cooking ," she emphasised like he'd just teleported her dog to the moon.

"Y—Yeah?" He scratched his cheek, the knife dangerously close to his face. "What's wrong with it?"

"I have never seen you cook before." Not counting the times he blew up toasters. She walked in, lured in by the smell, and sat down at the small dinner table, being slightly different once again since the last time, courtesy of the TARDIS. "Thought it was beneath you."

"We-ell, I haven't been alive too long," he said, starting to cut what she could now see were potatoes. "Haven't had the chance."

"I meant…" She cocked her head. "Y'know, you. "

That last cut was more forceful than it had to be.

He took a second, using the knife to push all the potatoes off the board. "Right." He opened one of the cabinets. He took out some odd light brown spice containers. "I just suck," he admitted, much to her surprise. As he was figuring out the buttons on the stove, he answered her silent question. "We don't know where we'll land, so we can't rely on the local populations for food. And you need food."

" We need food," she corrected.

He ignored her. "And I won't be getting help from the TARDIS, because she's mad at me." He chuckled to himself, talking as if forgetting she was even there. "Can't imagine why…"

She ignored his antics and stared at him as he calmly continued trying his best not to burn down the kitchen. Despite the chaos, he looked so serene. His sleeves were rolled up and, despite it being an odd thing to notice, she thought his arms looked rather hairy. It was odd.

The whole scene made him look like a man. It made her slightly uncomfortable.

On another note, she didn't want to admit it, but she was rather hungry. She got up and went to his side, picking up one of the pieces of something purple she didn't recognise. She went to plop it in her mouth, but he grabbed her wrist tightly before she could.

"Don't eat that. It's poisonous when it's raw."

She almost wanted to eat it out of spite. He let her go and she let it fall from her hand. He returned to his vegetables like nothing had happened, but meanwhile, she wanted to rip his throat out.

The usual. She was still angry about the Titanic trip. She went to look at the other pots instead. The potatoes (well, what she had thought were potatoes) had turned an almost flamboyant orange.

What the heck was he cooking?

She blinked at it. "This doesn't seem like enough," she commented.

"Just for you," he answered mindlessly. "I don't care about him." He held the purple things to the light and inspected them as if they were alien.

Well—

She pondered it for a few seconds and suddenly he had a plate ready. He left it on the counter and took a few steps back, trying to subtly (but quite obviously) look at her, seeing what she thought.

It was delicious. "It's alright." It was genuinely a lot better than what she had expected of him, but he seemed to know what he was doing because it was delicious . Odd, as it were vegetables and…other things that she had never had before, but it was surprisingly lovely.

She thought he'd be looking at her like a kicked puppy, begging for approval, when she looked back, but… he wasn't. Wasn't even looking at her, he was just staring at the ground between them, zoned out completely. Part of her liked that he wasn't chasing her like a dog anymore, but the other part thought it was odd and it frankly hurt her ego a bit.

The way he looked at the ground made her feel bad for him. Now having to be in the same TARDIS without a chance of getting rid of him, she supposed she should be at least amicable. Despite, y'know, who he was.

Corin was struggling, to say the least. The comment of 'you' had turned his world upside down. He considered himself apart from the Doctor, but she didn't. She saw him as a continuation of the same man. And it all made a bit more sense. That's why she was so angry, wasn't it? She projected everything he did on him. She thought he was still that Time Lord, just not Time Lord anymore. Part of him was hopeful. The other was devastated. He wanted to start again, free from whatever he had done as an idiot.

"Are you alright?"

He looked up at her in surprise. She looked tentative and restrained, which made him feel a bit better. No, he wasn't—and he wanted to tell her that. He didn't care, if there was anybody he could talk to, it would be her.

But he would never do that. And he didn't want to act in a way different to him, let some cognitive dissonance make his presence even worse for her. "Of course I am," he answered, withholding a cringe in his chest.

Her face fell and hardened. She looked disappointed, just like she always had when he refused to tell her anything, even if she was the only person he'd admit anything to.

That was a good thing, at least. She wasn't totally disinterested in him. It didn't matter that it wasn't him that she cared about, but him. It didn't matter. He'd just be the non-Time Lord Time Lord for as long as she wanted him to be.

Corin had completely misunderstood, but that wasn't anything new.

Rose stared at him. Usually, he left if he could after avoiding her questions. He evaded her questions, yes, but his preferred method was not being there at all and avoiding her. But he kept sitting there, awkwardly leaning against the table. Waiting. On what? She wasn't sure why, but she persisted. "Really?"

He stared at her with a blank face. She could see the cogs in his brain working overtime, heating up and not functioning properly. She wondered what he was even thinking about. It wasn't that difficult or deep of a question.

It seemed to mean the world to him. He worked his mouth like he was struggling to get anything out. After a few attempts, he nodded, shortly, once.

Alright, well, she tried. She really did, and no one could hold that against her. She genuinely tried—this was on him. She went back to the plate and continued eating it in silence. A few seconds later, Corin left the room.

Perhaps she was wrong about him. He still ran away, after all. Same darn man. Same man who never considered her side of things. Same selfish, arrogant man. She sighed.

Corin was having an existential crisis. One of a series of multiple ones that he'd been having ever since he was born, and it certainly wouldn't be the last. His stupid brain prevented him from fully figuring it out. He was the Doctor, but he wasn't. But he was, he just wasn't Time Lord, but he wasn't fully human, either. He was some odd amalgamation in between the lines of existence and stability, and he would wobble on that fence until he fell face-first into insanity.

What was he? A Metacrisis, sure, but what did make of him? Was he as much Donna as he was the Doctor, and if so, did that mean he wasn't the Doctor at all?

It was a mess to say anything tangible.

And while he was dealing with that, Rose was nibbling on whatever he had made. The potatoes (but not really) tasted oddly like honey. It was surprisingly sweet, despite how salty it looked. She turned around to lean on the counter.

The Doctor was standing in the doorway.

She almost choked on her food in surprise, caught herself, and muttered: "What?"

He raised an eyebrow at her. "What?"

Rose tried to recover from the sudden appearance. She wasn't exactly sure where she stood with him, besides that it was on thin ice, but the shock briefly made her forget it all. "What are you doing?"

Crossing his arms, he leaned against the doorway, pretending to be casual. "You needed me?"

"What?" A memory from long ago popped up in her head, but she kept it away. She shook her head involuntarily. "No, I didn't."

"Oh." His stance lost its defensiveness. "The TARDIS called me here, I figured…"

"Not at all." She looked back at the orange potatoes. "Except if these are poisoned, I suppose."

"What the… Where'd you get freedom fruits from?" He walked up next to her. As she repeated what he'd said ( freedom fruit ?), he picked one of them up, put them to the light, and sighed. "That's not fair. I was saving those." He looked at it wistfully. "TARDIS hides them from me."

She ate another one. "Corin had them." She frowned. "But he said she was mad at him."

He turned to her a bit too quickly for her liking. "Mad? Why?"

"I mean, he's you. Isn't that enough?"

After a second, he chuckled. "Right. Still, if she gave that to him… No way she's mad."

She shrugged. "He said it. Dunno"

The lights flickered, getting both their attention, but Rose quickly ignored it and returned to her food. The Doctor stared at the ceiling for a while longer. Rose didn't notice the building silence as she ate.

"How much do you know?" he asked, staring out in front of him.

"What do you mean?" she asked softly as he turned his back ever so slightly towards her.

He shrugged, but his shoulders were too tense for it to calm her. "I don't know. About me. The—" He swallowed his words. "You obviously know me, and I want to know how much."

She rubbed her greasy hands off her pants. She wasn't sure how to tell him without hurting him or anything. It was dangerous ground, and knowing how vulnerable he had to be to even ask this, she didn't want to say the wrong thing. "I know about the war," she said, gently. "I don't know a lot about the details, but I do know about the…" She had no idea how early it was for him. He'd just beaten the Nestene consciousness, and she had no idea how long it had been since then. She had no idea how much of it he had already processed, if any. She took a shot for it anyways, since he had asked. "Daleks."

He flexed his hand and at her silence, he hummed. "Okay."

She looked away. Could she really tell him she knew about the Moment, too? It seemed too big a step. She remembered it surprisingly loosely, but she remembered the vibe well.

That was the only time she'd ever seen him cry, in both of his bodies. It seemed stuck in his throat, saying it out loud like bile, and then he never brought it up again.

'I know you're the one that killed everyone' wasn't exactly an easy thing to say. Maybe she'd tell him eventually, but not now. "You've mentioned Gallifrey, too. Nothing detailed, though. That's about it."

She saw him nod in her peripheral vision. She looked back at him, but he still refused to look at her.

"Okay." His face was surprisingly blank. He looked at her, nodded once, smiling lightly, and left.

She walked him step away. It was odd. To have to start again, yet she knew so much more than he would be comfortable with. It was having an immense amount of power that she could abuse if she wanted to. She didn't want to, but the possibility hanging around her felt wrong. She wondered how he was experiencing all of this. She had focused on herself, and that she felt bittersweet about it, but how was he…

"Wait!" she called out.

He turned around, his face plastered with surprise.

She held up one of the freedom fruits. "Don't you want some?"

He stared at it, blinking. His face cracked out in a smile. "Yes, I do."