Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Chapter One

“Ready, Kara? Put your hand there—to the left—yes, perfect.” The Doctor dances around the console, away from Kara, flipping switches and grinning like he’s having the absolute time of his life. He probably is. “Rose,” he says next.

“Hold the zigzag plotter steady, kick the noodle-thing when it goes ping,” Rose says. Her hands are already in place, and the Doctor pauses in his dance to look at her, that unadulterated amazement shining in his eye as if she’s the most wonderful person in the entire universe. Rose wonders if she’ll ever be able to bask in that look without blushing.

“You’re brilliant,” he says. Then he’s gone, darting back to his task, running his hands over the console and moving—always moving.

Even after so many years, he’s still made of wonder and boundless energy. Still her Doctor, even with the threads of grey at his temples and the lines on his face—somehow more attractive even than he was when she first loved him. He moves around the TARDIS as he always did, as if he could make her fly with his thoughts and his heart alone.

Of course, this isn’t the same TARDIS and he isn’t quite the same Doctor as the man she first met. Humanity has settled into his bones, and domesticity has fallen over his shoulders like a cloak. A battle hard-won, but over the course of countless nights waking him from nightmares, of finding him surrounded by bits and bobs from Dad’s garage (and more than once, the Torchwood archives), of soothing his itch to keep moving with spontaneous trips to visit the wonders Earth has to offer, the tension in his limbs settled into something like peace.

But not stillness. Never stillness.

Rose thinks the universe might just up and stop working if the Doctor ever for one moment held still. Even in sleep, he’s a wriggler.

“Ready?” The Doctor beams, hands braced on the console, stars in his eyes. “Allons-y!”

The TARDIS shudders into motion, loud wheezing and all, and Rose matches the Doctor’s grin with one of her own, because of course she loves it just as much as he does. She feels alive in this machine-which-isn’t-really-a-machine, just like him.

“Now, Kara,” the Doctor commands. Across the console, eyes just as starry as her father’s, Kara slams her hand down on the button and laughs as they ricochet through space.

Not Time. Not yet. Their TARDIS is still young, still new to traveling outside the solar system, and far smaller than the old not-a-machine she grew from. The three of them stand around a small console, decorated in rainbow stickers—Kara’s childhood contributions. A pale turquoise hue colours the round things on the walls, close enough Rose could reach out and touch them if she weren’t so busy waiting on the so-important ping.

There are only two doors off the main hub; the exit and the bathroom (the Doctor of course wanted to celebrate the TARDIS growing her first room by turning it into a soft-play nightmare, complete with ball pit and waterslide, but Rose quickly shut that down). Their TARDIS might be small, but it’s theirs, and Rose loves it.

Still, it’s not one for long trips. Which is why, after their visit to the Feydon Nebula and its extremely bouncy moss—Rose is definitely not telling the Doctor she’s getting a bit old for all that bouncing—they’re heading back home so Kara can sleep before school tomorrow.

The ping finally sounds. Rose kicks the noodle-thing, the Doctor looks at her again as if she hung the stars and her heart flips for the millionth time, and the TARDIS rumbles.

“Gorgeous,” the Doctor says, stroking the console. “You gorgeous thing, you’re doing so well. Just a little further to get back home. Then we’ll get you on the Rift to charge, how does that sound?”

Rose meets Kara’s eye. Her daughter sniggers, pressing a hand to her mouth, and Rose presses her lips together to smother her own laugh. At fifteen, Kara is the female-miniature of her father, long brown hair perpetually tied back in a high ponytail, gorgeous brown eyes Rose used to spend hours staring into back when she was young. Kara even has her father’s dress sense, which is to say none at all. She’s wearing yellow dungarees over a blue jumper, old ratty trainers stuffed on her feet, and she’s covered in pockets. Her hands are filthy—somehow they always seem to get covered in something—and there’s a smudge of moss on her cheek.

She’s the most incredible person Rose has ever known, and that’s saying a lot.

“Doctor?” Rose says, pulling her eyes away from her daughter to focus on her husband, whose calm encouragements have shifted into worried mutterings. That old familiar frown is back, and his eyes are darting between the screen and the console. “Everything okay?”

“Fine. Everything’s fine,” the Doctor says absently.

Rose coughs. The Doctor blinks and looks up, and his expression clears as he realises what he’s said. His lie.

“Sorry,” he says. “Not fine. Clearly not fine. There’s a crack, which of course is fine. See them all the time, scars left over from that time the universes were dying. Usually I’d just patch it, easy-peasy, sticky plaster, universes a little more squeaky. But she’s resisting me.”

He dissolves into more soothing noises.

Kara’s not giggling at him anymore. Instead, she mirrors her dad, running her hands over the console. “Come on, Teddy,” she says. “Just a little crack. You can do it.”

Rose smiles, despite herself. Teddy is an old nickname, from before the TARDIS had walls and Kara was smothering her in stickers because it made her glow a little stronger—when Kara stubbornly decided the word TARDIS was to be pronounced ‘Teddy’.

The console hums. A shudder runs through the TARDIS, and Rose presses her own hands to the console. “You can do it,” she whispers.

“Hah!” the Doctor shouts, startling Rose from her focus. He grins at the two of them, all bubbly again. “Brilliant! My three brilliant girls, all working together. That’s all she needed, just a little—”

The room shudders hard. Rose hurtles back from the console, slamming into the wall and crying out at the jolt of pain that spasms through her shoulder at the impact.

“No!” the Doctor cries. “No, you can’t—we can’t—I can’t—”

“What is it?” Rose demands.

The Doctor stares at the screen. He’s clinging to the railing, horror mounting on his face. “We’re falling through,” he says. “Something’s pulling us through.”

“Through to where?” Kara asks, a thread of fear running through her voice and sending Rose’s heart into overdrive.

The Doctor just shakes his head. “To another universe,” he says. “I can’t—I can’t stop it.”

Another universe. A thousand thoughts run through Rose’s head at once. She knows what it means to be trapped in another universe. It means no way back. It means never seeing Mum or Dad or Tony again. It means saying goodbye to the life they built, their house on the canal, the pictures on the walls, the memories they’d collected. It means never seeing her friends again, and never telling them what—

“How long?” Rose demands.

“I don’t… a minute. Maybe two.”

“Get me as much time as you can,” Rose says. “Kara, call your friends. Leave them a message. Tell them you love them.”

She pulls out her phone, hits the speed dial.

“Mum?”

“Rose!” Jackie’s voice fills Rose’s ear. “Listen, I’m glad you called. I just heard from Tony; he’s coming home this weekend from uni. No doubt he’ll have bucketloads of laundry; he’s just like you were at that age, always taking advantage. Anyway, I was wondering—”

“Mum, shut up.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“Mum, I’m with Kara and the Doctor. We’re falling out of the universe. I don’t think we’re gonna make it back.” Rose’s voice cracks and for once, silence answers her. She presses the phone to her forehead. “I don’t have much time,” she says. “I love you. Tell Dad and Tony I—all of us, we’re sorry. We’re gonna miss you. We love you.”

“But… but you can’t.”

“We’ll be okay,” Rose promises. “We’re together. We’ll look after each other.”

“I said, didn’t I?” Mum’s voice wavers. “I said you going off in that machine was a bad idea. All along, I said it.”

Rose smiles. “Yeah, Mum.” Her eyes burn. She looks up and the Doctor is watching her with such soft, sad eyes that her heart breaks all over again. “But you know us. We’re big fans of bad ideas.”

“You tell that Doctor of yours to look after you, yeah?”

“I will.”

“And give him our love,” Mum says. “And Kara. Oh, Rose, I—”

The line goes dead. On the other side of the TARDIS, Kara lets out a soft wail. There’s a violent shudder that threatens to turn Rose’s insides into goo and with a final wheeze, the TARDIS goes still.

For a beat, there’s quiet. Then, “is everyone okay?” the Doctor asks. He’s the only one of them still standing, clinging to the console with a white-knuckled grip. And despite everything, despite the fact her heart is breaking and tears are stained on all of their cheeks; despite the beeping phone still in her hand and Mum’s final words still ringing in her ears, a small seed of excitement is humming in Rose’s chest.

“Where are we?” she asks, picking herself up.

The Doctor comes unfrozen. He doesn’t answer immediately, instead hurrying over to Kara and pulling her to her feet and engulfing her in the biggest hug in the world.

“I’m so sorry,” he breathes.

Kara buries her face in her dad’s shoulder for a moment before she emerges, eyes sparkling. “Well, you did promise me an adventure,” she says. “Go on, Dad. Where are we?”

The Doctor hesitates, taking her in, and then explodes into a grin—all his energy bursts forth. “Right!” he says. “Where are we?” He wiggles his eyebrows at Rose and oh, it’s like she’s nineteen again, standing across from his old face and humming with excitement.

Outside is anywhere.

The Doctor dashes to the screen, clever eyes flicking over readings Rose can’t even begin to fathom. A frown ghosts across his expression and then, “Oh,” he breathes, an exquisite softness floating up inside his eyes. His hand trembles as he reaches out and brushes his fingers over the screen. Rose hurries to his side as the first tear slips down his cheek and she slips her hand into his.

“Doctor?” she asks.

He’s still—for a heartbeat he stares, one hand clinging to Rose, the other still hovering over the screen. Then the smile spreads, growing slowly before exploding right across his face, another tear escaping as he turns and flings his arms around Rose, a buoyant laugh sounding in her ears.

“Come on,” he says, leaping out of the embrace and reaching for Kara. “Come on, come on.”

He dashes for the door, flinging the doors wide open and laughing again as he steps into the space beyond.

“Kara,” he says, turning and spreading his arms wide. “I’d like you to meet the TARDIS.”

The noise that comes from Rose’s throat is strangely reminiscent of a dying seagull, and is entirely involuntary. Her jaw drops as she steps out into the place that can really be nowhere else, though it’s entirely unlike the TARDIS she knew.

Instead of bronze and coral, the room is dark and metallic. The space is bigger than she remembers, too—stairways run up to a raised platform; below them is another level she can just make out through the translucent flooring.

“He’s redecorated,” Rose breathes, running her fingers over the metal bannister as the Doctor makes for the central console. He doesn’t touch anything, but the way he takes it all in is beautiful.

“Hello there, old girl,” he says. “Do you remember me? I missed you. Kara—come and meet her. TARDIS, this is my daughter.”

Kara walks slowly across the room, taking in every detail within her clear gaze. She gives Rose a quick half-smile as she passes, before tucking herself into her dad’s side.

“Is the Doctor here?” she asks. “The… other you.”

“The Time Lord,” the Doctor says with a low chuckle. “No, I don’t think so. He’d have come running by now if he was in. He must be out there, somewhere.”

“Do you think he still looks like you?” Rose asks. “Or… is it a previous you?”

The Doctor tilts his head, squashing his cheek into Kara’s hair. “Future, I think,” he says. “I don’t remember this desktop.” He wrinkles his nose. “I don’t like it much. He’ll probably have a new face. Different tastes.”

Rose turns to look at the so-familiar doors, trying to keep the dismay from her face. She still thinks about her old Doctor, sometimes. The man who’d died to save her, with his big smile and his leather jackets and his broken heart. She’d loved him, even then, but the Doctor that came after…

He’s gone, too. He’s another man, now. She hopes he wasn’t alone when it happened. She hopes he’s out there, somewhere, having a splendid adventure with some new companion who helps him remember how amazing life is. For a flicker of time, she lets herself hope that it’s Donna. Even though she knows about the metacrisis. How it’s impossible. How there’s next-to-no-chance Donna stayed with the Doctor afterwards.

“Do you think he’ll like me?” Kara asks, and Rose throws off her melancholy to turn and beam at her daughter. The girl who’s so like her father.

“Kara,” the Doctor says. “He’s me. He’s going to love you.”

 Kara holds his gaze for a moment before bursting into motion, darting free and making for the doors. “Then let’s go find him!” she says, throwing the doors open and disappearing into the unknown.

Rose meets the Doctor’s eye. She sees her own panic mirrored in his face. They both know just how dangerous life is with the Doctor.

As one, they both call out for Kara to wait and run after their daughter.

Chapter Text

Chapter Two

Outside the TARDIS, Rose does not immediately find herself face-to-face with a monster, or a handful of guns, or anything that screams imminent danger. She knows that doesn’t mean it’s safe.

But.

Looking around, they seem to be in the side corridor of some kind of restaurant, which is not what Rose expected. It looks nice¸ even.

Kara’s already striding ahead, and Rose pauses only for a moment before charging after her, the Doctor keeping pace at her side, and oh, the running! It’s been a while since they’ve had much excuse to—since Kara grew old enough to stop wandering into traffic or throwing herself off helter-skelters.

“Kara, wait!” the Doctor calls, but too slow. Kara throws open the doors at the end of the corridor and skips through.

Rose hears her say something, but can’t quite work out what it is. She bursts through the doors after her and comes face-to-face with the most stunning restaurant experience she’s seen in her life.

The walls and ceiling are all glass; beyond the dome, a cosmic light-show is taking place. It reminds Rose vaguely of the Northern Lights back home, but multiplied by a thousand. Colours swirl across the heavens, intertwining and separating like threads of music made into light.

“Oh,” the Doctor breathes at her side. “The Narokan SkyFire. It’s an annual event on Narokona, but colours like this only happen once in a millennia. We’re in the year four-point-seven-slash-alpha.” He grabs Rose’s sleeve and beams. “She time travelled.”

“It’s incredible,” Rose whispers, the magnitude of his words—their TARDIS’s first trip through time—diminished by the vision overhead.

“Sir. Ma’am.” A sharp voice snatches Rose’s attention. “I don’t believe we’re waiting on any additional diners today. What is your reservation code?”

“Whoa,” Kara says, beaming at the furious waitstaff. “I love your hair.”

The Narokan is entirely colourless, their white hair billowing around their pure-white shoulders as if it has a gravity entirely of its own. At Kara’s words, the Narokan’s posture stiffens and they pull out a long, thin pole from their belt; at the press of a button it extends into a staff and buzzes awake.

“If you do not confirm your reservation in the next—”

“Sorry!” the Doctor interrupts, sidling his way between the Narokan and Kara. “No need for that. We came to make a reservation. What are the wait-times?”

“Our next SkyFire event with space for reservations will be in twelve years’ time,” the Narokan snaps. “And we do not take reservations in person. You are disturbing our guests.”

Sure enough, curious eyes have turned away from the spectacle overhead, and a low, unpleasant muttering is buzzing around the room; the Narokan’s lips grow thinner.

“Well, as we’re here,” the Doctor says, hunching his shoulders and grinning as if he’s entirely harmless. Rose doesn’t think that tactic has ever worked. “How about you pencil us in? John Tyler, table for three.”

“Very well. Your payment?” asks the Narokan, holding out a hand and glowering.

The Doctor blinks. “Payment?” he says.

The Narokan’s weapon buzzes; Rose grabs Kara’s hand and yanks her backwards; the Doctor cries out as the weapon collides with his arm, and then he drops like a bag of rocks.

“Doctor!”

“Dad!”

“Drop the weapon.” A new voice sounds, and Rose—trying to hold a struggling Kara behind her—finds herself face-to-face with a tall woman with crazy hair, a blaster in her hand and a cold smile on her face. “Don’t worry, he should be fine in a moment. Narokan staffs are set to stun.”

“River! I thought I told you no guns; where were you even—Rose.”

The man who stumbles out of the restaurant flapping his hands with abandon stops dead at the sight of Rose. His eyes drop to the Doctor’s body on the floor and a strange spasm runs through his face.

“Doctor?” Rose guesses. He’s dressed much more elegantly than Rose anticipated; a black top-hat sits on a head of floppy hair and he’s wearing actual tails, complete with white bow-tie and everything. Still, he can be no-one else, with that look in his eye and the constant energy Rose can see vibrating under his skin.

“Sweetie?” the woman with the blaster says, a dangerous sweetness in her voice. “Would you care to introduce us?”

The Doctor opens and closes his mouth. His eyes skip from Rose to the Doctor on the floor, and back to Rose, as if he can’t quite look at either of them for more than a moment.

He’s clearly not introducing anyone right now.

Rose smiles. “Rose Tyler,” she says, holding out a hand for the woman. She thinks the Doctor said a name when he charged over, but it’s entirely gone from her mind. “This is the Doctor,” she adds, waving a hand at her husband. “Well, part human-Doctor. I think you’ve got the Time Lord one with you. And our daughter, Kara Tyler.”

The Doctor makes an odd strangled noise.

“Rose Tyler,” the woman says, shaking her head—her gun doesn’t waver from the furious Narokan. “Of course you are, look at you. I know pretty-boy, though he’s looking a bit older than I remember.” She takes Rose’s hand. “Professor River Song. A pleasure to meet you.” Her attention snaps to the Narokan, who began to inch towards the welcome stand. “Don’t even think about it. We’re talking.”

And, oh.

It takes all of Rose’s focus not to start floundering like the Doctor. Professor River Song is a name she’s heard before. She’s heard the name spoken with anguish, with curiosity laced with pain. The Doctor met her in the Library and she knew his name and she died.

Rose’s Doctor told Rose his name when they stood at the altar, whispering it in her ear like a promise. When did River learn his name? Is she… it’s hard to imagine the Doctor—the Time Lord Doctor—getting married.

Rose’s eyes skip to the hand steady on the blaster. No ring. But still…

“I’m Kara,” Kara interrupts, beaming and snatching River’s hand from Rose’s. “Are you the Doctor’s companion? Why do you have a gun? Dad says he doesn’t like guns.”

River smiles and winks. “He likes them when they’re mine,” she tells Kara.

“I do not,” the Doctor splutters. He blinks and seems to come to his senses. He beams and scratches at his chin. “Hello,” he says.

“Hello,” Rose says. She opens her arms. “Do I get a—” He crashes into her with all the enthusiasm of a five-year-old, and Rose laughs, catching his ridiculous top hat before it can fall off his head.

She’s reminded of the first time she hugged him after he regenerated—all awkward angles and a not-quite-right fit, but still so completely him. She squeezes him back and smiles so hard her face hurts, because she thought she’d never see him again and here he is and he’s even pleased to see her.

A long gasp breaks them apart; Rose turns to see the Doctor (that’s going to get complicated) sitting up and blinking around. “Argh,” he says. “Scatterbrain prods. Awful things.” He beams up at Rose. “We don’t appear to be imprisoned, that’s good news. Everyone okay?”

“Hello, Sweetie,” River says. “Nice of you to join us.”

The Doctor—Rose’s Doctor goes white. “River,” he says.

“Sweetie?” the other Doctor… River’s Doctor? says. “He’s not. He’s.”

“He’s you, Sweetie,” River says. “No need to get jealous. Now, I believe our friend the Narokan has just triggered the silent alarm. I think it’s time to run.”

Rose’s Doctor scrambles for his feet, his movements a little too shaky to be normal. “Right-o,” he says. “Back to the TARDISes, then? Allons-y.”

He grabs Kara’s hand and runs directly into the doorframe.

Rose catches him before he can fall.

“Scatterbrains,” the Doctor mumbles. “Awful things.”

Kara drags him sideways, through the doorway. “I’ll lead,” she says. “Come on, Dad.”

River’s Doctor makes another strangled noise that sounds strangely like the word Dad, but Rose doesn’t have time to unpack that right now. She hurries after her husband and daughter, back down the corridor towards the TARDISes.

“One day,” River says as they dash towards the blue box and a shout calls after them. “Is there even the slightest chance that we might go on a date that doesn’t end up with me having to run in heels?”

“You’re the one that keeps wearing them,” River’s Doctor snaps back. “Besides, it wasn’t my fault this time.”

“Not your fault?” River scoffs. “Sweetie, your metacrisis self who is supposed to be trapped in another dimension just barged in on our meal. What part of that isn’t your fault?”

“He’s not me!” River’s Doctor says. “I can’t control what he does. Besides, this is exciting! Isn’t this exciting? Dates where we don’t end up running are boring.”

He snaps his fingers and the doors to the TARDIS fly open; they barrel inside and slam the doors closed behind them. River’s Doctor lunges for the control panel, flipping switches with abandon.

“Rose,” River says, adjusting her gorgeous green dress with remarkable poise. “How often do your dates end in running?”

“Oi!” Rose’s Doctor says.

“Now that you mention it,” Rose says, grinning at him. “It’s more often than you’d think.”

“Oh, like that time you ended up on the beach in Yarmouth?” Kara pipes up. “Didn’t you crash into the middle of a seal sanctuary or something?”

River tips her head back in a laugh. “Still can’t drive, then?”

The TARDIS lurches around them, as if to punctuate her words. “It’s meant to do that,” the Time Lord shouts.

“No it isn’t,” River calls back.

“I can drive fine!” Rose’s Doctor protests. “The TARDIS is young, that’s all. Her controls are a bit unruly.”

He moves to stand at the other Doctor’s side, and as the TARDIS stabilises in flight, they’re both wearing identical looks of putoutedness, arms folded, scowls in place.

River kicks off her shoes and sets them to the side, rolling her neck. “Did you want a lift to your TARDIS, then?” She makes for the controls, setting her hands to the console as if she knows what to do with it, and Rose feels a twang in her stomach that she tries to push away.

Her Doctor has explained why the Time Lord was never able to admit his feelings towards her, and why he was. She’s glad the Time Lord isn’t alone—and she likes what she’s seen of River Song, but there’s still a little part of her wondering how River ever got this man wrapped around her little finger. How she got him to teach her how to fly the TARDIS. He’s taking her on dates, even.

“Our TARDIS is here,” Kara says brightly. She points to the corner, where their TARDIS sits, disguised as another part of this TARDIS, its metal exterior shaped like a cabinet that blends so well it’s almost forgettable.

“The Chameleon Circuit,” River’s Doctor says, his mood shifting in an instant. He dances—somewhat less gracefully than Rose’s Doctor—towards the baby TARDIS, running his hands over its outside. “Oh. Hello. How did you get here, you bonkers ship?”

“There was a crack, right Dad?” Kara says. “Our universe has them all over the place, from when the universes were all broken. We fix them up, usually, but something went wrong this time.”

“It sensed the vibrational frequency of this universe,” Rose’s Doctor says. “It sensed this TARDIS—the TARDIS it grew from. The matching energy frequency pulled us through, and bam! here we are.”

“And the crack?” River asks.

“It sealed behind us,” Rose’s Doctor says. “No way back.”

“I’m sorry,” River says.

A beat of silence settles inside Rose’s heart. She thinks of Mum’s voice, cut off at the end of the phone. Tony visiting from uni—to find them gone. They were going to take him on a trip to Ryderia for his next birthday.

“Want to see inside?” Kara asks, cutting through the solemn moment. Her hands are fidgety and she’s smiling too big at River’s Doctor.

“Do I…” The Doctor bows with an exaggerated flourish, sweeping his top hat into his hand. “Lead the way, my dear.”

The Doctors both disappear inside the ship, and Rose exhales, letting them take their time comparing ships. She loves him with all her heart, but one Doctor is quite enough work. Besides, with Kara there, they can’t behave too badly.

“I thought it was just him,” River says into the quiet. “But your Doctor looks at me just like the Time Lord does. The younger him, especially. Before he found out who I am. I thought he was just afraid of who he thought I might be to him. Who I am. But you look at me the same way, too.”

Rose closes her eyes.

“Do you know me?” River asks. “The Doctor said I never met you, but he’s been wrong before. Often.”

“I’ve never met you before,” Rose says.

“But your Doctor has.”

“Before. Back when he was still part of your Doctor.” Rose snaps her eyes open. “What if I told you—”

“Spoilers,” River interrupts, pain drawn across her face. “If it’s about my future, you can’t tell me. I just… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” She stares back at their TARDIS. “I’m seeing him more and more when he’s young,” she says. “Seeing this Doctor, the Doctor who knows me, is getting rarer and rarer. I just know it’s coming—the day he meets me. The day he’ll look at me and look right through me.”

Rose swallows. She remembers hearing the story of Professor River Song for the first time, the tears the Doctor had tried to hide. Another person giving their life for his, the woman who knew so much about him. The woman it hurt so much to lose, and the terrible, horrifying knowledge that one day, he’d have to lose her again. It had scarred him and he’d hardly known her.

What would it do to this Doctor? The one who argues with her about shoes and splutters when she calls another man—another him—‘Sweetie’?

“I’m sorry,” River says, and when Rose looks at her again, the mask is back in place. “You don’t know me. I’m oversharing.”

“Have you told him?” Rose asks. “Have you asked?”

River looks at her, a confused hardness in her eyes. “Why?” she asks. “It would break his hearts. Never show him the pain, Rose. Surely he’s seen enough of pain.”

“He’s your husband,” Rose says. “Isn’t he? Doesn’t that make it his job to share the pain, just like you do?”

River shakes her head, but it doesn’t seem to be a dismissal of her words. “How could I do that to him? Is that what you do? Is that why your Doctor looks at you like…” She pushes away from the console, clearing her throat. “I think we should make sure they haven’t blown anything up. What do you think?”

“I think that I would once have given anything to have your Doctor look at me the way he looks at you,” Rose tells her. “And I think they’re being suspiciously quiet, you’re right. Let’s go.”

Kara bursts out of the TARDIS just as they reach it. “Mum,” she says. “Dad accidentally locked the Doctor in the bathroom and now he’s stuck and the door disappeared.”

Rose catches River’s eye.

River’s eyebrow quirks. “Two of them,” she muses. “I should have guessed.”

“Okay,” Rose says. “We’ll sort this. Doctor!”

Rose’s Doctor looks up sheepishly, clinging to two sonic screwdrivers and kneeling in the space where the door used to be. “Hi, honey,” he says. “I don’t know what happened.”

“River!” the other Doctor calls through the wall. “River, help me! They used their spare room to make a bathroom like boring people. I was just trying to enhance it!”

River presses a hand to her face. Rose sees her own thoughts echoed in her expression. It’s going to be a long day.

Chapter Text

Chapter Three

“Sweetie, you know I’d love to stay longer but I have papers to grade. I’m a Professor now—I have a responsibility to my students.”

The Doctor can pout like nobody else, Rose thinks. At River’s declaration, he chases after her with puppydog eyes so profound, Rose marvels at River’s ability to deny him.

“Your students aren’t going anywhere,” he says. “Who wants to be an archaeologist, anyway? It’s boring. I can take you anywhere in space and time and you want to go to work?”

“Yes, Sweetie,” River says, patting him on his cheek. “I do. You can go pick up Clara and take her on a trip. I’ll see you next week.”

“I can take you back to grading papers whenever,” the Doctor argues. “Come on, one more trip. I’ll take you to the Lost Moon of Poosh.”

River arches an eyebrow. “There’s nothing on the Lost Moon of Poosh. Besides, you put it back—it’s not even lost, anymore.”

“Well, wherever you want to go, then!”

“I want to go home, Sweetie. I told you; I’ll see you next week.” She kisses him on the cheek and steps in close, lowering her voice so Rose barely catches her words. “If you don’t take me home, I’ll handcuff you to the railing again and fly her there myself, and I don’t think you want me to do that in front of Kara.” She looks up and winks at Rose. “I don’t think Rose would mind, though. Maybe she could help me.”

The Doctor splutters, exaggerated outrage spreading across his face, his hands flapping. “River!”

“Yes, Sweetie?”

Rose chokes on a smile.

“You… you…” The Doctor makes a strained noise before storming back to the controls. “Fine,” he says. “Fine. You want to go home and be boring, you go home and be boring. I’ll take Clara to the Robona Nebula and you can’t come.”

“That sounds like a splendid idea, Sweetie. And maybe next time, I’ll drive and we’ll actually make it to Darillium.”

Both Doctors stiffen. Rose recognises the cold shock in her husband’s face, though the Time Lord Doctor hides his reaction better, bouncing around a little too manically.

“Who wants to see singing towers?” he asks. “We can go to Farilon Five and listen to the universe’s largest orchestra. Or the ood. River, have you ever heard the ood sing? It’s not like anything you’ve ever heard before.”

“That sounds lovely,” River says, unflipping a couple of switches in the Doctor’s wake. “So long as you turn up on time. I’m heading off on another expedition in two weeks. Have you ever been to the Library?”

Rose’s Doctor is suddenly at her side, his hand sliding into hers and Rose hurts. She hurts because she understands now why the Doctor stiffened at the mention of Darillium. It must mean something about the Library, because she’s heard that story before.

The Time Lord doesn’t still. He dashes around the controls, giving River the biggest smiles in the world, and when they land with a familiar wheezing noise, he takes River’s hand and pulls her from the box. “What’s so good about this place, then?” he demands, the TARDIS door squeaking closed in their wake.

Rose presses a hand to her face and tries not to cry.

“Mum?” Kara says. “Dad, what is it? Why are you sad all of a sudden?”

“Come here,” Rose says, lifting an arm so Kara can slot in at her side. She holds her daughter close, pressing her nose into her hair and closing her eyes.

“I first met River Song in the Library,” the Doctor says, his grip on Rose’s hand almost paralysing. “The only time I’ve ever met her. It’s also the place that she died.”

“What!” Kara jolts out of Rose’s hold. “No. No, that’s not fair.”

“Kara—”

“But you can save her,” Kara says. “Isn’t that what you do, Dad? You and him. There’s two of you now, surely that makes it even easier.”

“I can’t risk changing my own timeline,” the Doctor says. “Besides, the Doctor wouldn’t let me.”

There’s more to the story. Rose hears it in his voice, because she knows he’s made risks like that before. Time can be rewritten. He’s made that promise to her before. There’s more to the story of River Song.

“This is bullshit,” Kara snaps, shoving him in the chest before storming off towards their TARDIS. There are tears in her voice, and Rose wants to chase her, but…

“Go after her,” she tells the Doctor. “I’ll wait for him.” She nods towards the door, and her husband nods.

“Probably best I’m not here for that bit,” he admits, before pressing a hard kiss to the back of her hand; her cheek; her lips. “I love you.”

Rose leans into him. “I love you too.”

Then she sits down in the dark shadows of the TARDIS to wait.

It’s long minutes before the Doctor returns, hair and clothes mussed up, lips swollen, eyes deep chasms of pain. Rose has seen heartbreak on the Doctor’s face. She stood by his side when the TARDIS was supposedly destroyed; she’ll always remember the way his voice broke when he said, ‘they’re all gone, Rose,’ and the weight of his loneliness had been so deep she didn’t know how he could bear to stand.

This is somehow worse. This is waiting for the finale that he knows is coming. Bracing for impact and being wholly unprepared. Rose’s heart breaks.

The Doctor scans the room.

“Kara and my Doctor are gone,” Rose says. “They’ve gone into our TARDIS. It’s only me.”

“Rose,” the Doctor breathes, sagging back against the TARDIS door. His careful mask cracks. “My Bad Wolf. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Rose leaps to her feet, crossing the space in just a handful of strides. She takes his face in both her hands and she can almost feel the misery coming off him. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I lost you,” the Doctor says, gripping her jacket. “I trapped you there and I didn’t even give you a choice.”

“And I love you for it,” Rose tells him. “You hear me, Doctor? My life is better—unbearably better—because of you. Because you came into it and you changed me, and you gave me him and I love him, so much. You have nothing to be sorry for. I owe you everything.”

He just shakes his head, clinging tighter to her jacket. “I don’t know how to do it anymore. I try, and I try, and every time it hurts more. Oh, Amelia.”

He sinks to the floor, and Rose follows him, tears burning her eyes, sliding down her cheeks. She ignores them. “Who’s Amelia?” she asks.

The Doctor whines like his hearts are breaking—and it is. “Pond. Amelia Pond. The Girl Who Waited.”

“Your companion?” Rose asks.

“Lost,” the Doctor says. “Lost just like you. Lost with Rory, living where I can never reach them. And here I am. Looking for another person to lose.”

Rose wraps her arms around him and he shakes.

“She didn’t even cry,” the Doctor says, a long moment later. “River. They were her parents and she was too busy looking after me to even—and now I have to say goodbye to her, too, and I can’t—I don’t know—Rose, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I can’t do it. I can’t. I’m so tired of goodbyes.”

“I know,” Rose says. She strokes his hair back from his forehead. “You love her.”

He makes a soft, strangled noise, and tucks his face into her arm and sobs. Rose rocks him back-and-forth, remembering a thousand nights woken by nightmares; first the Doctor’s, then Kara’s. She knows the rhythm of sympathy. Knows the cadence of sobs, the gentle stroke of hair through her fingers.

She knows the beat of her heart and the cadence of the body in her arms as they ride out the wave of agony together.

She knows the gentle calm that follows the storm; the tired emergence.

The Doctor is a man like any other, in this case. An unfathomable length of time later, and not nearly long enough, he lifts his head, rubs his face, blinks as if to remember where he is. He clears his throat and pushes down his misery and tries to reassemble his broken mask.

“Rose,” he says.

“Hello,” she says.

His eyes are his own. The Doctor, really here, really in her arms, really breaking apart. He strokes a gentle hand over her cheek. “I loved you,” he says. “So much.”

Rose smiles. “I know.”

“I just couldn’t—”

“I know,” Rose says, because she does. Because in another life, if he’d let himself love her, she knows there would have come another day like this one. A goodbye that hurt more than any of the others. She supposes with River, he just wasn’t quick enough to guard his heart, or he was too tired to do so. Or—maybe—there’s still a wall up inside him.

He’s here, breaking down in front of Rose, after all.

Never show him the pain, River had said.

“Have you told her?” Rose asks. “That you love her?”

The Doctor drops his head into his hands and shakes no. “I can’t,” he says again.

“I’m sure she knows, but still—tell her,” Rose says, curling a hand around his arm and tugging. He unfurls, climbing to his feet in a wonky stumble. “Before it’s too late. Before it’s another regret.”

The Doctor’s throat bobs. “I will,” he promises.

Then he gives her a wobbly smile and shakes off a layer of melancholy. “Rose Tyler. When did you get so smart?”

Rose ruffles his hair. “I get it from my mum,” she says, and that works.

He laughs, misery falling off him like a shroud and all of a sudden, he’s the Doctor again, bright and energetic and excited. He wriggles out of her arms and bounds towards the console, all uncoordinated limbs and childlike excitement. He adjusts his bowtie and beams at her.

“Want to meet Clara?” he asks. “She’s impossible. First time I met her, she was a Dalek. Then she was a Governess in Eighteen Ninety Two. She died. And then the Wi-Fi was broken in the Twenty-First century and there she was again. Impossible. You’d love her. Promise.”

Rose wants to. But.

“Next time,” she swears. “I think my Doctor and I probably need to go find a home base of our own. Figure out being back in this universe. But here—” she pulls her phone from her pocket and holds it out. “Code is two-zero-zero-five. The year we met. Call me. Or I’ll call you.”

The Doctor slips the phone into one of his pockets. Rose knows he won’t call her.

“Thank you,” he says.

“I mean it,” Rose says, pointing at him. “Call me. If you ever need—you’re not alone, okay?”

He nods, smiles as if he’s not shattered inside.

Rose turns her back on him and makes for her own TARDIS.

Enough.

She pushes the doors open, kicks them closed behind her.

“Are you okay?” the Doctor asks, standing up from Kara’s side. Their eyes are so identical, big and brown and concerned.

“Take us out of here,” Rose orders. Then, when the initial wheeze quiets down and they’re in flight, she looks from her husband to her daughter and the love she feels for them swells inside her. “We’re saving River Song,” she tells them. “Doctor; you can either help me do it without breaking any timelines, or you can get out of my way. I’m doing it. That man has seen enough loss.”

“Yes!” Kara cheers.

Rose watches her husband. He wavers, then his shoulders relax and he leans against one of the columns. He nods. “Okay,” he says.

“Good,” Rose says. “Now, tell me everything you know about her. And take us to Earth. We’re going to need reinforcements.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Four

Torchwood is rubble. Old rubble, cleaned away and rebuilt but scarred like only a bombsite can be. Rose can’t look at the scars; instead she looks at the Doctor, standing frozen outside the TARDIS—disguised now as a modern-day, rundown phone booth. He hurts. She hurts. This is so far from what she imagined, and now she wonders at her naivety, expecting this world to remain the same as it had been so many years ago.

“Where is it?” Kara asks, slouching past her father with her hands in her pockets. “Do we shout? Jack would be looking for the blue box, right? Maybe he didn’t notice?”

“He’s alive, right?” Rose says to the Doctor in a quiet voice. “Even if there was a bomb… Would he survive a bomb?”

The Doctor’s throat bobs and he shudders before inclining his head. “Yeah,” he says around a croak. “Yeah he would.”

Just the thought of it makes Rose’s blood shiver in her veins. How much would he have felt? She hopes he was a long way from the blast when it happened.

“Kara,” Rose calls after her daughter. “Kara, he’s not here. He’s long gone.”

Kara turns, ponytail swinging in the wind. “What?” she calls back. “Why?”

Why.

Rose isn’t sure she wants to know. What happened to Jack—the endless trudge of life that he is now—is on her. She saved him. What did that saving subject him to?

She swallows and looks away. “Now where?” she asks. “Martha’s? Doctor, it’s been years. What are the chances she’s even there? I don’t even know where Mickey might be.”

“I know somewhere we can try,” the Doctor says, glancing away. “But we might have to be careful.”

The next street they materialise on is quiet and residential. The Doctor’s expression is guarded, and when Rose slips her hand into his, he grips her tight.

“Donna?” Rose asks.

He nods. They don’t know what happened to Donna after she left them on that beach—for a long while, Rose had kept going with the knowledge that the Time Lord wasn’t alone. Donna had always been so good for him.

And then her Doctor told her the cost of a human-biological metacrisis. Donna wasn’t made from regeneration energy like he was. Her mind wouldn’t be able to handle the knowledge surging between her too-human synapses.

The Doctor would have found a way to save her. Rose knows it in her bones.

Still, the slow walk towards that house is the longest of her life. The answers to questions she isn’t sure she ever wanted answers to, because the hope…

The door flies open before they even reach it, an older woman with dyed blonde hair flapping her hands furiously in their direction.

“What the devil do you think you’re doing, coming back here?” she snarls at the Doctor. “As if you haven’t done enough. Lucky for you, Donna’s out at the shops and you’d better be gone before she comes back.”

“Lay off him,” says another voice from the doorway. An old man rolls out the door in a wheelchair, grinning widely. “Look at you, you got older. Got better, then?”

This must be Wilf. Rose can read it on the Doctor’s face, the soft care he has for the old man. Donna’s favourite grandfather.

“I’m not him,” the Doctor says. “It’s complicated. And I’m not here to make a mess or—or interfere.” He glances down the street. “Is she okay? What happened?”

“You should know,” Silvia says. “What do you even mean not him? You’ve got his face!”

“He’s a part-human version of the Doctor,” Rose explains. “He was made from the other Doctor, the one you know, and from Donna—and there was some regeneration energy and a hand and… I’m sorry, it is complicated. But he isn’t him.”

“So that’s why she has that thing in her head?” Wilf asks. “Why you—why he had to take all her memories away? Can you put them back? Can you fix her?”

The Doctor flinches as if from a blow, his face collapsing in on itself. “He had to take her memories?” he says in a soft, broken voice. “I hoped… but I suppose…”

Rose tightens her grip on his arm and is so glad they won the fight to keep Kara inside the TARDIS. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Are you here to fix her?” Wilf asks again.

The Doctor hesitates, and then shakes his head. “I can’t,” he says. “If the Doctor wasn’t able to—I’m weaker than him, telepathically.”

“Then get out of here,” Sylvia says. “She’ll be back any moment, and if she sees you, there’s no knowing what’ll happen. It’s hard enough keeping her attention away from any major events, just in case aliens decide to show up again. You being here is dangerous for her.”

“I know,” the Doctor says. “We’re leaving. I just had to know—”

“And we need your help,” Rose interjects. “We’re looking for some old friends, but we don’t know what happened to them. Torchwood is gone, we don’t even know where to start with Martha, or with Mickey, and—”

“Well I can help with the last bit,” Wilf says, looking sideways at Sylvia. “I’ve been keeping tabs on his friends.”

“You have not,” Sylvia snaps.

Wilf grins. “Martha sent me a message just a month ago. She and Mickey are travelling—seems they both have a bug for it nowadays. Hiking all over the damned world, those two. Wanted to take Donna once, keep things secret, but it was too dangerous.”

“They’re travelling together?” Rose asks. The Doctor looks just as bewildered as she feels.

“Well, ‘course,” Wilf says. “They got married, didn’t they?”

“No,” the Doctor breathes. “No way.”

“Where was it this time?” Wilf mutters to himself. “Not Africa, they did that last year—six months they were away. South America, someplace. Peru. They were doing this big hike.”

“Not the Inca trail?” the Doctor asks.

Wilf beams. “That was it. Bingo. Inca trail.”

The Doctor laughs, but carefully, the weight of Donna’s price still heavy in his limbs. “Brilliant. We’d better get out of your hair, then.” He glances up the street, and the ache is in his face and Rose knows how much he wants to see her—Donna is a part of him, a rough edge to his voice that never existed before, tied up inside a deep unwavering compassion laced with stubbornness that took some getting used to (and that Rose now loves with all that she is).

“Have you seen him?” Wilf asks, as they turn to leave. “The Doctor? Do you know where he is?”

“We saw him,” Rose says.

“Is he okay?” Wilf asks.

No.

Rose smiles, looking back over her shoulder at the old man in the wheelchair. “He will be, once we’re through with things,” she says, reaching for her husband’s hand. “We’re going to go save his wife.”

Wilf’s eyes widen comically. Even Sylvia is stunned, but just for a moment before, “poor woman,” she notes.

Rose laughs. “Oh, it’s not all bad,” she says. “Besides, I think she handles him very well.”

“Good,” Wilf says. “You look after him.”

“Look after her,” the Doctor says in return, that soft agony back in his voice.

“Of course we will.”

The Doctor ducks his head and Rose tucks herself into his side, and as they step into the phone box and glance back down the street, a woman turns onto the road with flaming red hair and an unmistakeable walk.

They wait until she’s gone inside and music blares from inside the house before they risk taking off.

For once, Kara doesn’t even ask. She stands by the console, looking down at her phone, turning it over and over in her hands and god but her eyes are so much like her father’s, big and brown and so sad.

The Doctor isn’t the only one who’s lost a friend today.

“One more trip,” Rose says, moving to her daughter’s side. “Then sleep.”

Kara straightens up, tucks her phone away and grins like her father. Rose is going to need yet another talk with them both about hiding how they’re feeling before this is over. She side-eyes her oblivious husband, who has forced the bounce back into his own step as he dances over to his daughter, extolling the incredible sights of Machu Picchu.

“You should see it in its prime,” he gushes, pressing buttons and decidedly not looking back at the door. “Incredible; you know they had more than three thousand varieties of potato? Their agriculture was decades before its time.”

“Didn’t they have, like, so much gold?” Kara asks, copying her dad’s enthusiasm. “Statues and things?”

“The most gorgeous temples you could imagine. And would you look at that?” He shoves the screen in Kara’s direction. “See that? She’s formed her first connection with the Time Vortex. Lessons from Mum, I’d imagine, when we got pulled through by the old TARDIS. All growing up, aren’t you?”

He strokes the console.

“We can travel in time?” Kara demands, grabbing the screen with both hands.

The Doctor waggles his eyebrows at Rose and she can’t hold back her grin. She knows there’s heartbreak in there, but damn if he’s not good at funnelling joy into difficult moments. There’s a reason she loves him with her whole soul.

“Let’s not tire her out straight away,” Rose cautions (she hears an odd echo inside her thoughts; the new Doctor’s incarnation whining about boredom—but damn him, someone’s got to keep these two in line and it’s certainly not going to be the Doctor). “I’m sure Machu Picchu is incredible right now, too.”

“Right you are.” The Doctor swings past her, catching her around the waist and kissing her just long enough for Kara to whine. “Right now, it is.”

He kicks out behind him and they ricochet into flight, his arm tight around her waist, holding her steady. Rose has been married to the man for nearly twenty years, and still she swoons at the intensity in his eye.

“I love you,” he says, a murmur under the noise of the engines.

Rose leans into his chest. Her heart ricochets. “I love you, too,” she says.

They land with a shudder, and Kara shoves between the two of them with a sideways glance of amused exasperation, before she throws open the doors to reveal a sky absolutely full of stars… and a familiar figure sprinting up the hill towards them.

Mickey staggers to a startled stop a mere twenty metres away—close enough that Rose can see the way his body jolts, before he takes off again even faster, tearing past the Doctor to pick Rose up in a monstrous hug, spinning her around.

She doesn’t think he was ever this pleased to see her back when they were dating.

“What—?” Another, less familiar person comes into view, wearing soft hiking clothes and astonishment. “Doctor? Rose?”

The Doctor waggles his eyebrows. “Hello, Martha,” he says.

Martha makes a soft, startled noise, and throws herself at him, tugging him into a hug just as firm as the one Mickey gave to Rose.

“Hey, boss,” Mickey says, inclining his head towards the Doctor, who grins and bumps his fist.

“I’m Kara,” Kara says, sticking out her hand for Mickey to take. “Kara Tyler.”

Martha looks from Rose to Kara to the Doctor and laughs at the dumbfounded expression on Mickey’s face. “Of course you are,” she says. “Martha Jones.”

Kara beams. “I know. Hi.”

“Hi.” Martha’s smile widens.

“You married Mickey Smith,” Kara says, and oh yeah.

Rose whirls on Mickey. “You got married?” she demands. “That is insane. Congratulations!”

Mickey comes back to himself, slow grin building. “Oh yeah,” he says. He pulls Martha into his side. “Yeah, I did.”

“So did you, by the looks of it,” Martha says, leaning into Mickey and reaching for Rose’s hand. “Let’s see? Is it blue? I always thought it would be blue.”

Rose laughs and holds out her ring—three sapphires set into silver—and Martha squeals, showing off her own (a stunning diamond, well done Mickey).

“Not that we’re not happy to see you, but how on Earth are you here?” Mickey asks, looking around. “When we heard the engines, we thought—well, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen the Doctor.” He squints. “Where is the TARDIS, anyway?”

“And how come you have the TARDIS?” Martha adds. “Is he…” She glances at Kara. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, ‘s fine,” Rose says. “We grew our own, see?” She jabs a thumb over her shoulder. “Chameleon circuit’s still working, so sometimes she…”

She looks over her shoulder.

Mickey’s laugh is a sudden explosion, familiar in the way it settles into Rose’s bones and she lashes out to thump him without even thinking, staring at the disguise their TARDIS has become.

“It’s a portaloo,” Martha says, strangled constraint in her voice. “Very… resourceful.”

“It’s…” Mickey’s wheezing, bent double, tears in his eyes. “It’s a Turdis.”

No. Rose uses her every ounce of willpower not to laugh, biting down hard on the inside of her lip and holding her breath as she glances sideways at the blooming outrage on her husband’s face.

“You’d better watch it, Smith,” the Doctor says, something of the oncoming storm and a whole lot of Donna Noble (even more dangerous) sparking in his eyes. “Nobody disrespects my ship.”

“Your ship is a toilet,” Mickey wheezes. “All of time and space and it’s a portaloo. Martha, hold me, I’m dying.”

Martha has both hands pressed to her face, and Rose makes the ultimate mistake of meeting her eye.

The laugh explodes from them both at the same time, resulting in a loud, “Oi!” from the Doctor and an equally dismayed, “She’s not a toilet, it’s a disguise,” from Kara.

Rose sags against the wall of the TARDIS (the Turdis, oh god she’s going to perish) and giggles until she can’t breathe, until Kara’s disgruntled expression turns amused, and even the Doctor grins.

“Are you done?” he asks after a long while, when Rose manages to suck in a lungful of air and wipe the tears from her face.

She almost re-dissolves into giggles just at the look on his face. She nods, meekly. “Sorry.”

“Are you?” the Doctor says, rolling his eyes and offering her a hand. “Look up,” he whispers.

Rose takes his hand, blinks away the remnants of her laughter and looks up.

A river of stars blinks down at her and all hint of amusement is chased out of her body by the rush of astonishment. She clings to the Doctor’s hand, breathless for an entirely new reason.

The night sky over the Inca trail is so alight with stars, it’s the spaces between the lights that are remarkable, drifting shadows of nebulas ghosting like clouds across the view. Rose has seen the stars from so many angles, and so much closer, but she’s standing on Earth right now, and she never knew just how close the universe could feel with her feet on solid ground.

“Oh,” she breathes.

“Nice, innit?” Mickey says, pulling Martha into his side. “We’ve been all over, Martha and me, but this place…”

“It feels like you can touch the stars,” Kara breathes. There are tears in her voice, a soft longing, and Rose looks over to see the river of stars reflected in her daughter’s eyes.

It scares her to death. It’s the most beautiful thing in the universe.

“Alright boss. Rose,” Mickey says after a long while, breaking through Rose’s concentration and stunning her back to Earth. Mickey nods at her, all amusement gone. “I don’t imagine you came to find us just to enjoy the view. Why don’t you tell us why you’re here?”

Chapter Text

Chapter Five

Last night it was raining, Rose remembers, laying on the floor of Mickey and Martha’s camp and looking skyward. Last night, she spent her evening watching telly while the Doctor read his latest book—an Agatha Christie. She had to pause every five minutes, when he interrupted to tell her all his latest theories, until she had to threaten to steal the book from him just so she could watch her programme.

Martha hands her a bag of trail mix and Rose stares at it in her hands. The last time she ate, she was standing at the kitchen counter, threatening to cancel their TARDIS trip if Kara didn’t sit down and eat something. Rose ate three slices of toast, because she knew there was a very real chance they’d be back home late.

Their bread will go off, Rose realises, and of all things, that’s what gets her. She hands off the bag of trail mix to Kara and mutters an apology before bursting into tears.

“Mum?” Kara instantly reaches for her, and she’s too young for all this turmoil—but then, so was Rose, just nineteen when she first met the Doctor. Just nineteen when her life changed forever. Kara is sixteen, even younger, even more wide-eyed at all of this.

“I’m okay,” Rose says, accepting Kara’s fierce hug. “I’m sorry. It’s just… what a day.”

Kara laughs softly into Rose’s shoulder, hands shaking on her back. She doesn’t make any move to sit up again, and Rose closes her eyes for a long moment, living in the soft rise and fall of Kara’s chest, the grip of her fingers, the evidence that she’s still here, still okay even though everything has changed.

God, Rose has a whole new perspective on that year she went missing now.

“What’s going on, Rose?” Mickey asks eventually, everything about his words careful in a way they never used to be.

Martha must be good for him.

Rose looks over at her husband. The Doctor sits up, shoulders tense, watching her and Kara like he’s not quite sure where he fits. It’s a familiar look, that pressure in his jaw, but Rose just has to tilt her head, and he relaxes, shuffling closer and reaching one arm around them both.

Martha smiles at Rose with such softness.

“I was just thinking that our bread will go off,” Rose says with a wry smile. “We didn’t exactly expect to be universe hopping today.”

“How did you get here?” Mickey asks. “I thought it was impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible,” the Doctor says, leaning into Rose. “I should know that by now, but somehow it keeps surprising me.” He shifts, lifting his hands so he can gesture wildly. “What you need to understand is that parallel universes vibrate at different frequencies. That’s why my—his TARDIS shut down when we fell into the other universe, that first time, Mickey. Remember that? It didn’t belong there. But our TARDIS—”

“Teddy,” Kara murmurs.

The Doctor nods his head in her direction. “Occasionally nicknamed ‘Teddy’,” he allows. “Our TARDIS was grown in that other universe, it learned to utilise the energy it was used to. But that isn’t where it came from. It came from a fragment of the original TARDIS, from this universe, and so when we happened across a remnant of this universe, it latched on. Dragged us through, right into the alternative TARDIS.”

“You landed in the TARDIS?” Martha says, sitting forward. “So you saw the Doctor? Has he regenerated? Wilf said—when we contacted him, he said that the last time he saw the Doctor, he was dying.”

The Doctor scoffs. “He looks like an oversized child. Did you see that chin, Rose? And the top hat? I half expected him to waltz out with a cane.”

Rose shoots him a look. “Darling, it took you a year and a half to agree to wear anything other than that blue suit. You’re not one to talk.”

“I like that suit,” the Doctor says.

“I know.”

“He’s married,” Kara pipes up. “We crashed his date.”

“No way,” Mickey says, gaping at them. “Who the hell managed to tie him down?”

“She’s called River Song,” Kara says, slouching against Rose now, as if Rose were some kind of couch rather than a person with an aching back. “She pulled a gun out of her handbag and held up an angry waiter.”

“A gun?” Martha says, raising her eyebrows. “The Doctor doesn’t like guns.”

“Apparently he does when she’s holding them.” Kara giggles. “He kept flailing whenever she moved it but he didn’t try to stop her. I think it’s romantic.”

“River Song,” Mickey says, squinting into the distance. “That rings a bell. Something about Silencio…” He shakes his head. “I don’t remember. You know, there’s no record of him anymore? All the databases have gone blank. And I looked closely. Someone’s wiped him clean. There was something before, some record of a River Song, but it’s gone now.”

“Public memory has changed, too,” Martha says. “Daleks over London, the Sycorax invasion, the Master—he came back, by the way. I don’t know all of what happened, Wilf was involved and the other you was dying, but now there’s nothing. Nobody seems to remember. Just those few of us who knew him. Me and Mickey, Sarah Jane, Wilf… that’s partly why we keep in touch. So we know for sure it was real.”

“And Jack?” Rose asks. “We went to Torchwood, but—”

“Blown up,” Mickey nods. “Awful business with this alien called the four-five-six. Jack… well.” He pulls a face, and Rose shivers at the look in his eye. “He’s gone. Not dead—I don’t think anything can keep him dead—but he’s off-world. The Torchwood team is finished.”

Martha looks away, blinking hard, and Rose aches.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

For a moment, her words hang in the silence between them. Kara is quiet, lounging in Rose’s arms, and though Rose is hideously uncomfortable, she can’t bring herself to move. Not when her heart is heavy and Kara has been through more than enough today.

“Rose,” Mickey says, drawing her out of her thoughts again. He’s sitting cross-legged on the other side of the camp, older than she remembers him, harder but also happier. He looks back at her with all the universe in his eyes. “What’s going on?” he asks. “It’s great to see you, but I’m thinking you didn’t just track us down in the middle of nowhere just ‘cause you missed me.”

“Nah,” Rose says. “I barely remember you. It was the Doctor who missed you.”

“Oi!”

Mickey and the Doctor both cry out in unison and Rose grins, squeezing her arm around Kara.

“We came to ask for your help,” Rose admits. “And because we missed you.”

“What do you need?” Martha asks. “We’ll do what we can.”

Rose looks down at Kara, who’s face has softened with tiredness but who has decidedly not succumbed to sleep. She looks up at Rose with a trust that makes Rose feel altogether too large for herself, and still somehow too small. She looks at Rose like Rose can fix all the problems in the universe, and Rose is going to goddamn try.

“It’s about the Doctor,” Rose says. “The Time Lord Doctor. This one here’s doing okay.”

“I am, am I?” the Doctor says, quirking his eyebrow.

She levels him a look, and he sits back in surrender, and though there’s a shadow in his face that wasn’t there yesterday, Rose knows she’s right. He’s doing okay, because he can look her in the face and not lie with his expression. Because he’s sitting back and letting her take the lead on this one. Because, ever since she was stranded with him on that beach all those years ago, since he leaned forward and whispered his love for her into her ear, there’s been a peace to him that she never knew before. Like he knew he was allowed to be happy and he had decided to spend the rest of his life cherishing that, and not denying it.

Rose hadn’t truly noticed it—not until she looked into the eyes of the Time Lord, laughing with his own wife, and haunted by her at the same time. The Time Lord Doctor may be married, but that peace is nowhere to be found within him.

It’s well past time he got what he deserves.

So Rose sits under a river of stars and she tells Mickey and Martha all she knows of River Song. She tells them all she knows about the heartbreaking tale of two lives lived in the wrong order and a relationship built on death.

Then she tells them her plan to fix it.

“First,” she tells them, at the end of it all, with Kara curled up in her lap and a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and her back screaming at the position she’s stuck in, “We need to find some of River’s DNA. But more than that—we need her blood.”

“And how the fuck are we going to find her to get her blood?” Mickey asks, “Assuming she’s kind enough to donate a vial and doesn’t shoot us on sight—which, judging by what you said about the guns, is a possibility.”

“We need to know where she is,” Rose says, looking at her husband, who sits with his head bowed.

“We need the blue diary,” he says with a croak. “Which I left in the Library.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Six

The Library. Rose never thought she would see this place.

It’s calm. That’s the strangest thing about stepping out of the shelter of the TARDIS into the brightly-lit space—how calm everything feels here. There’s something about it; the soft peace that settles over her shoulders in the quiet space filled with books. Knowing what she does, it makes the place feel even more dangerous.

She triple checks every step she takes, turning back to see the Doctor leave the TARDIS looking like he might vomit. He crosses to her side in an instant and she threads her fingers through his, but he doesn’t look at her. He’s too busy staring at the shadows.

“So, where did you leave—”

“No.” The Doctor turns on his heel at the sound of Kara’s voice. She falters in the doorway of the TARDIS, one hand clinging to the door.

“What?”

“Stay there,” the Doctor tells her. “You stay right there. Don’t take another step. In fact, Rose, you should stay with her. Make sure—”

“I’m coming with you,” Rose says.

“I’m coming, too,” Kara says, stepping all the way out the TARDIS and scowling at her dad. “Don’t try and stop me.”

The panic on the Doctor’s face… “Kara,” Rose says carefully. “I think—”

“No!” Kara says, folding her arms and meeting Rose’s eye with a resolute glare of her own. “I’m not sitting here and waiting to see if you’ve been eaten by shadows. If you try and leave me behind, I’ll just follow.”

“Kids,” Mickey says, sauntering out of the TARDIS dressed in a leather jacket with a jacked-up flamethrower at his hip. He winks at Rose. “Who’d have ‘em? We’ll watch her back, boss.”

At his side, Martha is his pair. Dressed in leather, she also carries a gun at her hip and the brightest torch Rose has ever seen. She tosses another torch to Kara. “Cover your front,” she says. “I’ll cover your back.”

Rose tugs her own torch from her belt and flicks it on.

Last night, they slept under the stars. This morning, Martha and Mickey abandoned the rest of their hike and directed them to the most well-stocked B&Q Rose has ever seen. She doesn’t think she’s ever been so prepared travelling with the Doctor.

“This way,” the Doctor says. “Don’t let your shadows cross.”

Rose clings to his hand and follows him towards the shelves, the peace of the atmosphere warring with the terror in her gut.

Shadows dance wherever they walk. Rose holds her torch steady, watching the writhing blackness sink away from the beam just a little too slow for it to be natural. Darkness follows them—wherever she doesn’t hold her torch seems immediately drowned in blackness, as if the shadows have come to see them pass. The hair on Rose’s arms stands up and the Doctor’s grip is too tight.

Moving out of the twisting corridors and down a set of steps into the sunlight is more than a relief. Rose’s hand shakes when the Doctor releases her, leaping down the final set of steps. He sweeps up a small blue book from the edge of the banister. Its pages are thick and well-worn, a lifetime of stories tucked inside its covers.

Rose exhales in a shudder. A part of her imagined it would be long gone, claimed by another, but here it is. Safe.

The Doctor holds it closed, looking down at the TARDIS-blue design, a war within his expression.

A life he never lived sits within those pages. A life he was once destined for.

Kara skips past Rose and takes the final step at a jump, just like he did. She shoots Rose a look and then plucks the book out of the Doctor’s hands and flips it open.

“Come on,” she says. “It’s not snooping if we’re saving her life.”

She dances back out of reach when the Doctor reaches for it again, a small smirk dancing on her face. “Wow, dad,” she says. “I think he’s more romantic than you. See? ‘The Doctor surprised me with yet another wedding today. He brought me and my parents to the Great Forest of Malasor and married me in a blizzard of blossoms. Dad cried. He always cries after the first time, when he didn’t remember who I was. I think this was only the Doctor’s second wedding, but that makes four for me. He still dances like a lunatic.’”

 Kara looks up. “I wonder why her dad didn’t know who she was the first time.” She skims the pages, hesitating again halfway through. “Ooh, look, it’s a picture.”

She plucks a photograph out of the pages and holds it up. In it, the Doctor is beaming at the camera, dressed in a brown tweed suit and bowtie. Crushed into his side is a beaming young woman with long ginger hair and the excitement of the universe in her eyes.

Rose smiles. She knows that look. She’s lived that look.

At the woman’s side, a young man with brown hair is not looking at the camera—his eyes are on the redhead woman, and Rose softens to see the look in his face. It’s entirely clear that he isn’t there for the universe, but for the girl.

“It says ‘The Doctor with Mum and Dad,’” Kara says, reading the back of the photograph.

“That’s the Doctor?” Mickey says, grinning widely and plucking the photo from her hand. “God, he just gets younger and younger looking, doesn’t he?”

“He looks happy,” Martha says, leaning into Mickey’s side.

“Did they stop traveling with him for a while?” Rose asks, wandering over to Kara. “They can’t have continued traveling with him if they had a baby.”

“I can’t believe he married his companions’ kid,” Mickey says. “That’s weird, that is.”

“They knew each other out of order, though,” Kara says. “It’s not like he met her when she was a baby.”

She frowns, turning pages all the way back to the beginning. “I don’t—I don’t even think he knew her as a kid. Wait, this doesn’t make sense. It says the Doctor gave her this diary when she was like fifty years old.”

“What?” Rose leans over her shoulder, taking in the slanted handwriting, the tiny sketches. “She didn’t look that old.”

Kara turns the page and Rose’s eyes snap to a word within the rest. “Wait,” she says, stopping Kara’s hand. “Does that say something about regeneration?”

“What?” The Doctor grabs the book from Kara’s hands and stares down at the scrawled words. He blinks; turns the page; flicks ahead. Rose watches his face, watches the pinched frown deepen and the swirling curiosity in his eyes, the tilt of his head and the blossoming smoothness of realisation.

“Oh,” he says.

“What is it?” Kara asks, standing on her toes, trying to peer over the top of the book.

The Doctor meets Rose’s eye over the top of the book. “I think she was conceived in the time vortex,” he says. “She had the ability to regenerate, until she gave her lives to him. To save his life.”

The shadows loom within the library halls behind him, and Rose reads the rest of the story in his eyes. River Song gave up her lives to save the Doctor, and then she gave up her life to save their story together.

No wonder the Time Lord’s eyes were so haunted.

“So, if we bring her back,” Kara says, looking from the Doctor to Rose. “Does that mean she’ll be able to regenerate again?”

“If it was the Time Vortex that gave her that power,” the Doctor says, swallowing hard, “Then if we grow her a new body inside the vortex… we might be able to restore her regenerations.”

Rose presses her hands to her face. “So she could be with him for lifetimes,” she realises.

“I don’t age,” the Doctor once told her. “I regenerate. But humans decay. They wither and they die. Imagine watching that happen to someone you—”

The Doctor wouldn’t have to lose River. Not like his human companions. Not like Rose. Not if they restored her regenerations.

Rose laughs around the tears building in her eyes. No wonder there was something about River Song that Rose never had. She was a promise to the Doctor like Rose could never be. The promise of time.

Rose will make that promise to him again. The Doctor gave her a husband with a life span to match hers. She’ll make sure he has the same gift.

“So how do we get her blood?” she asks.

The Doctor flattens the book on the banister, pointing at one of the pages, the description of a little girl in a space suit, shot by the mother who didn’t know she was pregnant.

“Dr Jones,” he says, turning to Martha with steel in his eye. “This one’s going to be up to you.”

Martha nods, handing over the photograph, the picture of a beaming Doctor surrounded by family. Rose tucks it carefully back inside the blue book, closing the cover just as an old familiar wheezing sound sings through the halls.

Rose flinches, looking over at the Doctor, who is frozen in place with one hand on the banister. “He knows we’re here,” he says.

“So?” Mickey says. “He can help us, can’t he?”

But the Doctor shakes his head, grabbing his torch and swinging its beam towards the dark corridors. “I think he’s going to do everything in his power to stop us,” he says.

“So he can’t find us,” Rose says. “Run.”

Torches flashing through the darkness, they tear back down the corridors, past the looming bookshelves and the shadows that linger. Rose lets the Doctor lead the way and she falls back, letting Kara overtake her, the little blue book clasped in her free arm. Rose points her torch at her daughter and does not let the beam waver.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Too slow.

They circle the final turn and there he is, bursting through the doorway with all the fury of the Oncoming Storm in his eyes. He’s dressed in purple this time, the rich dark fabric matching the darkness in his eyes. There’s frenzy in his movements; his eyes skip around the space and settle on the book in Kara’s hands.

“You give that back,” he growls, low and dangerous and so unlike the man Rose saw just yesterday. “It’s not yours.”

“Doctor?” An unfamiliar voice floats from the room behind him; a ring of footsteps sounds. “Can I come out now?”

A pretty young brunette comes into view, and Rose sees it in her immediately—the new joy of travel, the adoration of the man in tweed, laced with a touch of apprehension when she sees the rare danger in his posture.

“Doctor?” the companion says. Is this the Clara the Doctor mentioned before?

“I told you to wait in the TARDIS,” the Doctor says, not looking at her. His eyes are purely focussed on the book. “We’re not stopping here.”

“Why not?” Clara asks. She looks from the Doctor to the book. “What’s going on?”

“Kara,” the Doctor says. “The book. Now.”

Kara lifts her chin and tucks the book behind her back. “You can have it back when we’re finished with it.”

“Finished with what?” the Doctor demands, and the fire of the storm is ebbing in his posture. “This is finished. You have to let her rest.”

“But she’s not at rest.” Rose’s Doctor speaks up, stepping between the Time Lord and his daughter. He holds out one arm as a shield over Kara, and Rose had not truly wondered if the Time Lord was a danger to their girl until this moment. She holds the torch over Kara and the Doctor, and she watches the shadows as best she can.

“Why save her?” Rose’s Doctor continues. “Why give her the screwdriver at all if just to leave her here?”

“Save who?” Clara asks, worry sinking into her voice. “Doctor, who are these people?”

Rose imagines this is likely the first time Clara had been anywhere with the Doctor and not been the centre of his attention. Because that’s how the Doctor is when he’s traveling. He is all-encompassing and his focus is addictive, until one day you learn there is a depth to him you can never dream of touching. Secrets that bleed into the cracks of him, plastered up with smiles and next-next-next. Never looking back until the past comes to claim him.

“She’s safe,” the Time Lord says. “She’s saved. She can’t—”

“She can’t die,” Rose’s Doctor says. “She can’t end if you never look back. If you never visit. If you never take a risk that she could be more.”

“Please,” the Doctor says, tight and strangled and full of so much pain. “Give me the diary.”

“I can’t,” Rose’s Doctor says. “I’m sorry.”

“Doctor,” Rose says. “Let us help.”

The Time Lord groans and sticks his hands into his hair. He tugs and turns in a circle and every movement he makes is so full of discomfort, and Rose watches the eyes of his young companion get wider and wider.

“Why do you have to be this?” the Doctor snarls in her direction, before his movements seize. His hands are in his hair and his eyes fix on a distant shelf, his breath hissing out all at once. “More than every living thing in the universe,” he mutters.

“Doctor.” The companion is soft, setting her hand on his arm and snagging his attention. The Doctor looks away, into her eyes, and in them he sees what he always sees in his newer companions. Life before pain, when joy is still full in the heart. Compassion and hope and a promise.

Rose’s Doctor waves a hand behind his back and Kara tears off without another word; she sprints like only she can, belting it down the corridor, lights bouncing off her from Mickey’s and Martha’s torches as they chase after her. Rose doesn’t breathe out until she hears their TARDIS door close.

“What are they talking about, Doctor?” the companion asks. “Who’s is the diary?”

The Doctor bows his head, tension rich along his shoulders. “Don’t do this,” he says, as Clara moves to his side, slotting her arm through his even though confusion lines her expression. The Doctor doesn’t even seem to notice. “Please,” he says. “I promised.”

“I know,” Rose’s Doctor acknowledges.

“Please.”

“We won’t change the story,” Rose swears, moving forward and threading her fingers through her husband’s. “But that doesn’t mean there can’t be a new ending.”

“Doctor,” Clara says. “Whoever they’re talking about, if they can save her, shouldn’t they try? Isn’t that what you do? Save lives?” She shoots a wary look at Rose, and Rose makes sure to hold her gaze, to push trust into their connection and keep a promise in her face. She isn’t sure, if she was in this girl’s shoes, she’d have the same calm patience. But then, the Doctor is good at choosing who he needs in the moment, and it seems like this girl’s calm is just what he needs.

“Doctor,” the Time Lord says, looking now at Rose’s husband. “Promise me—”

“I promise,” Rose’s Doctor says. His lip quirks. “Not one line.”

“Is your name Doctor?” the companion asks. “Wait. Who are you all?”

“Oh,” Rose’s Doctor breathes out the word. “Just some old friends. Old limbs.” He winks at the girl. “We’ll see you again. Allons-y.” He grabs Rose’s hand and tugs her sideways, away from the encroaching shadows and the Time Lord and his curious companion, and after the brief surprise, Rose catches herself and races after him, running until her heart is close to pounding out of her chest, and the Time Lord doesn’t follow.

They can’t wait around for him to change his mind.

They have the diary. It’s time to move to Phase Two.

Chapter Text

Chapter Seven

“Help me.”

Rose clings to the TARDIS console, fingers white against the metal, stickers peeling under her nails. The screen in front of her is too small; she wants to be out there, instead of hiding away in what looks like a row of lockers while the girl in the alley calls for help.

Melody Pond. The girl who would one day become River Song, but not today. Today, she is small and alone and afraid, bleeding through her fingers.

Another hand settles on top of hers, and Rose realises how intensely she’s shaking when her husband stills her hand. The Doctor stands at her side, solid and unwavering and heartbroken, watching as Martha hurries towards the girl on the screen.

A strangled noise comes from behind them; Rose turns just in time to see Kara launch to her feet, a muscle pulsing in her jaw. She makes for the door. Alarm floods Rose, and she throws herself after her daughter, catching Kara around the waist before she can tug the door open and ruin everything.

“Get off me!” Kara cries out, wriggling in Rose’s hold. Her elbows jab Rose in the ribs. Her hair smothers Rose’s mouth and nose. “How can you just stand there and watch? How can you bear it? She needs help—we can help her.”

“We are helping her,” Rose swears, holding onto her daughter with everything she has. “If you go out that door and Melody sees you, if she realises this ship is more than it looks like, if you save her, her story will change.”

“Maybe it should change,” Kara insists, bowing her back and attempting to shove Rose away. “Isn’t that what you do, in all your stories? You help people? You fix it when things are wrong. This is wrong.”

“Kara,” the Doctor says, softly, crouching in front of them and taking Kara’s face in his hands, stilling her fight. “I know. We know. This is awful, and it hurts, and it’s wrong. A child is in pain, and that is the most awful thing in the whole universe. But this child cannot be saved. Not here, and not now.”

“But why?”

“Because of this.” The Doctor presses the blue book into Kara’s hands. “Look at this. If we change the beginning, that changes the middle. It changes the ending. If we save that little girl in the alleyway, then maybe the River Song I met in the Library doesn’t save me. Maybe the Doctor dies in that Library, before I even existed as separate from him. Maybe you’re never born.”

Kara tosses her head, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Maybe that’s better.”

Rose’s heart breaks. She presses her lips to Kara’s shoulder. She holds on, because that’s all she can do.

“I know.” The Doctor leans his forehead against Kara’s, tears shining in his own eyes. “I know. It’s exactly what I offered her when she tried to take my place. She told me that if I died there, we’d never meet and I told her ‘time can be rewritten.’ I gave her the option.”

Kara sniffs, and the Doctor brushes his fingers over her cheeks. “She looked at me, this woman who loved me and who I didn’t even know, and she told me before she died, she said ‘Not those times. Not one line. Don’t you dare.’” The Doctor’s voice cracks. “For her, Kara, for that woman you met yesterday who is going to die for me, who has already died for me, we have to let the little girl in the alleyway be afraid and alone. We have to let her die, so she can become who she needs to be.”

Kara sobs, slumping in Rose’s arms, wrapping her fingers around Rose’s sleeve.

“It’s not fair,” she says. “I hate it. I hate this.”

“I know,” the Doctor says.

“Is this your life?” Kara asks, voice trembling. “All those stories you told me, they were all so exciting. So full of adventure, and saving people, but it isn’t that, is it? It’s this.”

“It’s both, sweetheart,” Rose says.

A thousand memories swirl through her mind. She was nineteen when she watched the Earth die. When she watched a girl she liked step into the rift and give her life to her ghosts. When she gave a Dalek life and watched it murder hundreds. She has saved so many lives, and seen so many lost, and she never wanted Kara to understand the true toll that takes. The heartbreak that comes from trying so hard to help.

“You lied to me,” Kara says. “All those years, and you lied.”

“You were too young,” the Doctor says, tears tracking down his cheeks. “We never wanted—”

“I wanted to be just like you,” Kara says, dashing at her eyes and breathing hard. “I wanted to see the universe and save people. When we came here, I thought this was my chance, that it would be okay that we wouldn’t be home for Christmas, or that I’d never see Tony again, or Grandma or Granddad. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to Anne because she didn’t answer the phone.”

She coughs on a wail and everything falls into place. Rose meets the Doctor’s eye over their weeping daughter and she tightens her grip, doing everything in her power to keep the misery of the universe at bay. She always tried to keep the pain out of her daughter’s eyes. They never told her of the nightmares, or the agony of their separation. They never told her of the fear, or the loss, or the price.

Now Kara has lost her home, her friends, her family, and she’s here in their old unstable life, jumping from threat to threat. For goodness’ sake, they let her walk through the Library.

“I miss them too. So much,” Rose whispers, and she gets to watch the Doctor’s heart break again. She brushes her daughter’s hair back. “I’m so sorry.”

Kara looks up at her and sniffs loudly, lifting one side of her mouth in a lopsided, wobbly smile. “This is what it’s really like?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” Rose says, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

“Will you tell me the rest of the stories?” Kara asks, wriggling free of Rose’s arms now and brushing the rest of the tears off her face. Her eyes are pink and there’s a little spark inside her that has dimmed. Hardened. “The sad bits, too? Like what happened to Donna and the Library and the rest of it?”

Rose meets the Doctor’s eye. His expression is so easy to read, the conflict written into every line of his face. He has so many sad stories.

“Dad?” Kara asks, turning her head to look at him. “I want to know the truth. I want to know why the Doctor has such sad eyes. Why you look just like him, sometimes, when you think I’m not looking.”

The Doctor swallows, taking Kara’s hand in his. “I’ve lived a long time,” he says quietly. “There are some things I’ve done that… that might change the way you see me.”

Kara draws back, but doesn’t take her hands away. “Like what?” she asks.

“I—I don’t—”

“Does Mum know?” Kara demands. “Does she know everything you’ve done?”

“Yes,” the Doctor says, his eyes flicking up to meet Rose’s. “Yes, she does.”

Kara nods. “Then there’s a good reason for it,” she decides. “Whatever it is. If Mum understands, then I’m sure I will too.”

The Doctor splutters and Rose smiles at the look on his face and she struggles to her feet, every part of her aching from clinging to Kara (and from sleeping on the ground last night). She’s not as young as she used to be.

“Look,” she says, nodding at the screen.

Kara and the Doctor move to her side, looking up at the screen, where a little girl is regenerating all on her own.

The Doctor’s breath catches at the sight, and when Rose looks at him, he is smiling so wide, though his eyes are still red and there are still tracks of tears on his cheeks.

“We’re going to save her,” he says. “I promise you, Kara, we are going to save that little girl and we are going to give her a happy ending. You’ll see.”

The girl leaves the alleyway, staggering away in a new body. Rose watches her go, making her own promise to the scared girl inside her heart. The screen goes quiet, and Rose waits, unmoving. She clings to the console and she breathes, and Kara leans against her.

It’s a long while later when movement appears on the screen again. Rose finally tears her eyes away when the TARDIS door opens and Martha and Mickey return, holding up a vial of deep red blood.

They did it.

The Doctor takes the vial in his hands and beams too wide. “Brilliant,” he says. “Molto bene.” He turns on Rose and Kara, eyes shining. “Let’s destroy the bathroom.”

Rose grabs his arm. “How about you take us back to Martha and Mickey’s house, first?” she suggests. “Before you start tinkering.”

He rolls his eyes, but reaches for the console. “You know, Rose,” he says. “The Doctor’s right. You do have some boring ideas, sometimes.”

Rose smacks him. “You’ll be grateful for boring when your human bladder decides to remind you it exists, mister. Now get.”

She reaches for the zigzag plotter before he can direct her and is treated with a familiar glowing look.

Then he flips a switch and the TARDIS goes dark. Rose’s stomach drops.

“No, nononono,” the Doctor gasps, scurrying around the console, trying switches, before he tugs open a grate and slides under the floor on his belly.

Wrong. Rose’s breathing picks up. What is happening?

“What’s going on?” Kara asks, reaching for the blank screen. “Did she run out of energy?”

“Hand me a ferrowrench,” the Doctor says, and Kara drops into an old familiar cross-legged position and pulls out the kit from the cupboard in the floor. She flips open the case and grabs a ferrowrench, and for a moment, she’s seven years old again, sitting just like this at the Doctor’s feet, learning the names of every tool. Rose feels a twist in her chest, and she has to look away.

God, she loves them so much it’s terrifying.

“Is it bad?” Martha asks, cradling the vial to her chest, keeping her eyes on the door while Mickey stands guard at her side.

“Energy levels are fine,” the Doctor says, his voice muffled. “Screwdriver.”

Kara hands it over. “So why have the lights gone out? Nobody touched anything so it can’t be a loose connection again. We checked all those just the other day.”

“No, I think it’s…” The Doctor wriggles out from under the console. “Everything’s fine. There’s something external messing with her signalling. If I could just—”

He makes a strange waving motion with his hands, and Rose understands immediately. He’s trapped by the strange limits in his mind, unused to being disconnected from telepathy. He used to get so frustrated about it, back when the TARDIS was first blooming, frantically trying to figure out what was wrong with her (almost more frantic than when Kara was a baby and he could only vaguely understand her without the translation circuits).

“I’m going to take a look around,” he decides. “Martha, Mickey, stay here. Protect that vial. Kara, I want you keeping an eye on Teddy. Like I showed you.”

Kara nods and drops under the console, into the position the Doctor just vacated.

“Rose,” the Doctor says.

“I’m coming with you,” Rose tells him. “Someone’s gotta keep you from wandering off.”

“I do not wander off, Rose Tyler. It’s everyone else who’s so determined to go walkabouts while I follow the appropriate path.”

He opens the door of the TARDIS with a flourish and Rose grins at him before stepping out into the alleyway. It’s dark, and the air has a definitive chill that curls underneath Rose’s collar and winds down the back of her neck. The air has a stale smell to it, like metal and ash, and she walks carefully, keeping an eye out for the little girl who will one day be River Song. It would be no good to bump into her now, after all that trouble they took to avoid her.

But there is no child—nobody at all to be seen. Only a few drops of blood dark on the pavement. The Doctor tugs a cloth from inside one of his deep pockets and he cleans the smudge away. “Wouldn’t want anyone unpleasant getting hold of that,” he mutters, keen eyes skimming up and down the alleyway. “Now, if someone’s messing with our TARDIS electronics, they can’t be far.”

He licks one of his fingers and raises it high, then sets off in a direction. It’s probably even the right one; even human, he’s got the most irritating luck when it comes to running into danger.

Still, just to be sure, Rose scurries after him and plucks the sonic out of his pocket. She thinks hard at the device—it’s still wild to her how it seems to be powered by thought as much as anything else—and presses the button, illuminating the top in blue.

“Oi,” the Doctor says, but he’s grinning when the sonic pitches higher in frequency in exactly the direction he was walking in.

“You just got lucky,” Rose gripes, falling in step next to him and taking his hand. His fingers are warmer than hers, and dry, and the sensation of his skin next to hers immediately calms her.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

“What do you think of Scotland?” he asks. “Lovely place, Scotland. With the TARDIS charged up like this, I don’t think we need to be so close to the rift energy. We could hike. I love a good hike.”

Scotland? Rose blinks at him, struggling to catch up to his reasoning. “Are you saying you want to move to Scotland?”

“Why’d you say it like that? What’s wrong with Scotland? I love Scotland. Good schools. Good universities. Pity about Brexit, but Scotland at least has their heads screwed on about it.”

“You just want an excuse to do the accent, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he scoffs, turning up his nose.

“Doctor…”

“Well, yes, okay. Maybe it’s a contributing factor, but Rose I am incredibly good at the accent. Besides my other points still stand.”

“Do they.” Rose rolls her eyes and nudges him with her shoulder, smiling into the shadows. Scotland. “You don’t want to, I don’t know, move to Mars, then? Live in the TARDIS. Travel.”

“Well, there’s always holidays. Why? Do you want to move to Mars? I gotta say, Rose, it’s really not as nice as Scotland.”

“No, I mean it. Are you sure?” Rose asks. “Because I know you only settled because of me. Because Dad put us up, and then the TARDIS was young, and then Kara…”

“Rose.” The Doctor pauses, dragging her into his arms beneath a flickering streetlamp in an alley that smells of damp. “You and Kara, you are the adventure. The rest of it is all just decoration. Yes, we’ll travel. I’ll take you to all the most beautiful places in the universe, but at the end of it all, I admit I’ve gotten used to sitting in front of the telly with you, trying to read my book while you distract me with your hideous love island or—”

“Oh, you love it just as much as I do,” Rose argues.

“Yes,” the Doctor says, stepping fully into her space and touching his nose to hers. “That’s what I’m saying. Rose Tyler, will you move to Scotland with me and get another mortgage?”

Rose leans into him. “Doctor Tyler,” she says, “I would love to.”

The Doctor draws her in for a kiss, sweeping his hands through her hair before breaking away just as her knees go weak. He plucks the sonic from her hands. “Then we can get married again,” he decides, striding off now after the connection. “I will not have some Time Lord with the face of a twelve-year-old outdo me for romance.”

He frowns, scanning the next alley. Then he gives her a triumphant look and presses a finger to his lips before creeping towards a locked door and wiggling his eyebrows. A burst of blue from the sonic later, the door swings open to reveal an extremely teched-out shed.

There are guns on the bench. Rose bites back the temptation to grab one, tiptoeing inside after her husband.

“That’s right,” says a sudden voice, stressed and harried and accompanied by growing footsteps. Rose dives behind the nearest bench, gritting her teeth to keep from making any noise.  Not a moment too soon; the echo of high heels resounds inside the room, and Rose watches as a slender hand reaches out for the very gun Rose was eyeing.

“No, I don’t care that you can’t see a blue police box, I’m telling you there is a TARDIS in that alleyway and I am going to fire the next person who tries to tell me it’s impossible. There are records of it turning invisible, for god’s sake!” The woman gives a loud tut and clicks the safety off the gun. “Listen to me. I want the ship found and brought to me immediately. Our psychopath has run away; if I have to find a way to kill the Doctor myself, I will.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Eight

Rose has known fear. She’s stared into the chasm of a black hole and listened to the voice of the devil. She has watched the man she loves die in front of her twice, both times shortly after she had fought her way across time and space and universes to get to him. She knows it is no easy feat to kill the Doctor, and though she fears for him, she is used to that.

This is different. Because the TARDIS these people are looking for, with their guns and their fury, does not house the Doctor.

It contains someone a thousand times more important. Kara.

Rose is moving before her mind can catch up. She’s trained for combat in Torchwood’s archives, and she might be a little out of practise, but there is nothing that surprise and fury can’t bolster. As soon as the woman hangs up her phone call, Rose grabs her around the waist, knocks the gun from her hand and pins her to the floor in one flowing motion.

“If you scream, I will kill you,” she warns.

She thinks she’s even telling the truth.

Rose can’t see much of the woman on the floor; a riot of dark curls hide her face. She’s dressed in a smart pantsuit, heels on her feet. Definitely a commanding officer rather than a common grunt, and that works in Rose’s favour.

“I wouldn’t embarrass either of us in such a way,” the woman tells the floor. “You’re with the Doctor, I presume?”

She shifts, trying to move, but Rose digs her knee in harder. “What do you want with him?” she demands.

“Why, didn’t you hear my phone call?” the woman asks coolly. “I want to kill him. He’s a scourge of the universe, twisting up timelines to suit his own agenda, terrorising perfectly good planets, and nobody can stop him. He must be ended.”

“He saves lives,” Rose grits out.

“Lives aren’t always meant to be saved,” the woman answers. “He takes lives, too.”

Rose knows this to be true. She’s stood at his side while he’s made impossible decisions and she knows that every single time, he does the best he can. He makes the right choice as often as possible.

She will always remember the sheer joy in his eyes, in his voice, as they stood around a derelict bomb site in the middle of World War Two and the Doctor, with so much death in his memory, told her jubilantly, ‘Just this once, everybody lives!’

“You’re wrong about him,” Rose says. She leans close to the woman’s ear. “What’s more, I think you know it. I think you know that you are dark and twisted and cruel and you want him out of the way to continue your dark, twisted cruelty.”

“Melody Pond,” the Doctor says, and Rose looks up to see the Oncoming Storm in her husband’s eyes. “You took her. Didn’t you? You stole a baby from her parents and you turned her into a weapon. And now you’ve lost her.”

“Not lost.” The woman smiles into the floor. “Not for long.”

Rose grinds her knee harder into the woman’s spine. “She’s a child,” she says, full of the feeling of Kara sobbing in her arms, screaming for someone to help the poor girl in the alleyway. “You did this to her.”

“And I’d do it again,” the woman says. “So, what are you going to do to me, friends of the Doctor? Are you going to kill me? I hear he doesn’t like that. Or rather, he pretends not to.”

“You’re going to call off the search,” Rose tells her. “And you’re going to turn off that signal.”

“Am I?” the woman says. “Why would I ever do that?”

Rose grinds down harder on her spine and the woman just laughs before surging upwards, rolling sideways and grabbing Rose’s arm. Rose hits the floor with a smack and then—silence. The woman freezes.

Rose looks up.

The Doctor stands with the woman’s gun in his hand, pressing the barrel against her temple, his eyes cold as flint. “Don’t move,” he says.

“Oh, hello,” the woman says with a red-lipped smile, unmoving as Rose tugs herself out of the hold. “I admit, you’re not the Doctor I was expecting. But I’ve seen records. I know who you are.” She lifts her chin. “Which means I know you’re not going to shoot.”

“No?” the Doctor says. “You just said I was a killer. A scourge of the universe. Do you really want to try me?”

The woman smiles, lips curved into dangerous points. “Go on then,” she challenges.

“Call off the search,” the Doctor says.

“No. You’ll have to kill me.”

She’s fucking unwavering. Rose might be impressed if she didn’t hate her so much.

The Doctor moves in one fluid motion, bringing the butt of the gun down hard on the woman’s temple, sending her sprawling to the floor in a heap of limbs, hatred drawn on his face. He is cold and dangerous, and Rose takes his hand, removes the gun from his grip and replaces it with her fingers.

“She’s wrong,” she tells him.

A muscle works in his jaw. “Not completely.”

“She’s looking for our TARDIS,” Rose says.

“I know.”

He meets her eye, and Rose knows that he was absolutely, one hundred percent capable of pulling that trigger. Just like she might have been, given a lack of other options.

For Kara.

“Here.” Rose grabs the woman’s phone from the floor and tosses it at the Doctor. “See if you can break into that. We need to turn off that signal.”

“And her?” the Doctor says, looking down at the heaped woman on the floor.

Rose nudges the body with her toe. It would be so much easier if she was silenced forever.

A glint of something on the woman’s sleeve catches Rose’s attention and she drops to her knees with a blooming grin, pulling back the jacket to reveal a vortex manipulator strapped to the woman’s wrist.

“Where shall we send her?” she asks.

The Doctor pulls out his sonic screwdriver and tosses it to her. Rose thinks hard and jabs it into the electronics, which spark before bursting into action. Electricity buzzes and Rose pulls her hands away just in time – the body disappears in a fizz of static and a burst of light.

“You short-circuited its systems?” the Doctor asks.

Rose flips the screwdriver into the air and catches it again. “Like you have to ask. She’s not going anywhere in a hurry.”

“Where did you send her?”

“France. Seventeen-ninety-three.”

The Doctor whistles. “French revolution. That’ll certainly keep her busy.”

“Maybe she can have an exciting future as a guillotineist. Is that a word?” Rose brushes herself off and raises the sonic screwdriver. “Okay, let’s find out what’s blocking that signal and get the hell out of here.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

Rose takes the Doctor’s hand and veers into him, knocking him with her shoulder, a blistering wave of affection surging through her. He grins and nudges her right back before they both set off through the door and into the hallway, following the signal from the sonic.

They walk on quiet feet. Rose’s heart pounds against her ribs and her mind’s eye is nothing but the face of her daughter, vulnerable because of her. Not for long, though. Rose will burn this entire place to the floor before she lets Kara get hurt.

The corridor is a cliché. Dark walls, dim lighting, exposed brick. Rose might have rolled her eyes if she wasn’t so focussed on noticing every detail, down to the floating specs of dust in the air. It’s like these people took a villain lair decorating class and decided to go with the generic option every time.

A door opens ahead, and Rose is ready. She’s already running when the whirr of the sonic sounds behind her, sparking the lights behind the doorway. The soldier turns away, towards the flash of light and Rose barrels into him, pushing his gun up and away and clamping her hand over his face.

He moves against her in a surge, trained muscles reacting with instinct under his uniform, but just as he shoves her away, the Doctor arrives at Rose’s side, grabbing the gun away from the solider and freeing up an opening for Rose to rush back in. She jabs her forearm into his throat.

“Don’t say a word.”

The soldier’s eyes go wide at the sight of the Doctor. His expression hardens and he struggles, but he’s not strong enough to counter Rose while the Doctor holds his arm.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Rose tells him in a whisper. “We’re not here to hurt anyone.”

A muscle works in the man’s jaw. Disbelief is written on every line of his face.

Rose smiles. “But we are gonna need your uniform.”

A few short moments later, Rose has a hunk of cloth stuffed in her mouth, her hands are tied behind her back and there is a gun pointing between her shoulder blades.

The Doctor is not happy. She turns to give him a look and he scowls at her, the gun held awkwardly in his hand, the soldier’s uniform oddly fitting on his lanky frame. The soldier is at Rose’s side, his restraints much tighter, his gag stuffed further in his mouth. Rose keeps one of her arms looped through his, dragging him down the corridor while the Doctor covers them with the gun.

Honestly, the disguises are probably overkill. The Doctor could probably get by on his usual combination of bravado and enthusiasm, but Rose isn’t willing to risk it. Besides, this is exciting.

The next time someone passes by, they look away unseeing. Another prisoner haul – it must be common around here. Figures.

The beep of the sonic takes them around a corner, through a set of double doors, past an empty cafeteria, and down a flight of stairs to a large computer and a generator giving off enough heat to make sweat bead instantly on Rose’s forehead.

The room is empty. Rose isn’t surprised, with the sweltering temperature filling the space. It must be awful to work in here – she’d spend as little time in this room as possible, too.

Lucky.

She unwinds the rope from her hands and leans against a desk, grinning too wide at the hateful eyes of the soldier as the Doctor slides into place at the computer and starts typing incredibly fast.

It’s a real sign of how serious the situation is that he hasn’t started extolling the skills of Donna Noble at the first sign of a computer keyboard. ‘She was the fastest temp in Chiswick, Rose!’ – if Rose had to hear him explain that one more time…

He’s finished in record time, spinning away from the computer on the swivel chair and beaming up at her. “All done. Wasn’t that quick? Did I ever tell you—”

“Yes, you did,” Rose says, dragging him up by his collar. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

He tilts his head and beams. “Right you are. Allons-y.”

Rose ties the end of the soldier’s rope to the nearest desk and gives him a wink. “See?” she says. “Not a scratch. You’re free to help kidnap more innocent babies and terrorise civilians to your heart’s content. Aren’t you lucky.”

She drops the smile, shoves him into a chair and stalks out of the room, worried that if she stays in there another moment longer she might break her promise and punch the asshole in the face.

Maybe he’ll melt in this sauna of a room. She can hope.

She hooks her arm through the Doctor’s, and together they stick their heads out through the doors and look into the empty cafeteria.

“Run?” Rose suggests.

In response, the Doctor pushes through the door and pelts across the room at top speed. Rose takes off on his heels, dashing back down the corridor they came from. Shouts sound in their wake, and the click of a gun sounds, but the Doctor raises the sonic and the lights overhead explode, sending the corridor into darkness.

Rose finds the Doctor’s hand. They run together, passing small cracks of light from various doorways. Each buzz of the sonic means another locked door, more irate hammering. Rose’s chest tightens and her breathing quickens. Her legs prickle with blood flow they’re unused to, and adrenaline surges through her. The Doctor’s hand is slick and sweaty in hers, and he holds on too tight. She would not dare let go.

They dash together into the final room, where they came in, and with a look of cold anger on his face, the Doctor grabs handfuls of weapons, gathering them up in his arms.

Rose copies him, grabbing as many as she can hold.

They tip them into the nearest dumpster as soon as they emerge in the alleyway, and with another buzz of the sonic, the Doctor locks the metal thing closed.

It won’t stop anyone for long, but it’ll definitely inconvenience them.

A part of Rose longs to hang back, to burn the entire place to the ground. To make every person in that complex regret every choice they ever made.

But Kara is waiting.

Together, she and the Doctor sprint back towards the lopsided line of lockers that is their TARDIS’s disguise, and as they approach the doors swing open, revealing Kara’s beaming face.

“It’s working!” she calls. “I’ve made it ready for flight.”

The Doctor grabs her in his arms, whirling her around and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “Kara Tyler, you are incredible.”

Rose slams the door closed behind them and the TARDIS immediately starts grinding and whirring. They’re leaving, and Kara is safe, red-cheeked and beaming, with not a scratch on her.

Phase two, complete. Rose leans against the door and tries to remember how to breathe. Her heart is thundering, her body aching from the hits she took, and her blood is full of adrenaline.

The Doctor and Rose Tyler in the TARDIS. She watches her husband’s jubilation as he vaults towards the central console, pausing only to gather Martha and Mickey into his arms and marvel over the vial of blood they stole. The recipe to get the Time Lord his happy ending.

Seems they’re still the stuff of legends.

Chapter Text

Chapter Nine

Armed only with a cup of tea, Rose breaches the threshold.

Their TARDIS has become chaos. Where things before were never tidy, now they are pure bedlam. The console-room floor is strewn with wiring and piping, with discarded tools and abandoned plates. Kara’s legs are sticking out from beneath the central console and as Rose approaches, she lets out a bellow.

“Four seven nine!” Kara shouts, almost knocking Rose back with the force of her yell.

“Hold!” the Doctor’s shout comes from the room that used to be the bathroom. From within, a loud uneven clattering rebounds. “Now!” he yells.

Kara’s legs twitch; a low click sounds and the TARDIS hums, its lights flickering.

Rose waits, standing poised above the chaos with her tea, and when no immediate catastrophe seems imminent, she continues picking her way across the room, tiptoeing from one tiny undisturbed patch of floor to the next.

She’s reminded vividly of crossing Kara’s lego-strewn bedroom over the years.

Peering through the doorway, she finds her husband upside-down with his legs splayed up the wall, sonic screwdriver gripped between his teeth. Wires twine their way up and down his body, his nimble fingers scraping away at bare electronics and fusing them together.

His hair is flat and damp with sweat; the room is sweltering. Rose can feel heat emanating from every inch of floor and wall.

At least the tea won’t go cold.

“Don’t burn yourself,” Rose warns, and the Doctor looks up, delight blooming in his eyes at the sight of her. He tries to smile around the sonic.

“Ah,” he mumbles. “’er’ec’”

It’s truly a testament to their long years together that Rose hears the word ‘perfect’ in the mangled noise he makes. She casts around, then sets the mug of tea down on a patch of floor.

“Anything I can help with?” she asks.

“Mmm?” He blinks up at her from behind the wires and Rose sees that in the brief moment she moved out of his line of sight, he’d completely forgotten she was there.

He’s lucky he’s cute when he’s concentrating. It almost makes it worth being forgotten to see the utter focus in his eyes, the small furrow in his brow, the clever competence in all his actions. He is amazing, and Rose leans against the wall and crosses her arms to watch.

“Kara?” he calls, after a moment of fiddling.

“Five nine one!” Kara shouts back.

The Doctor grins, grabs the sonic from between his teeth and attempts to scramble to his feet.

The wires wrapped around him go tight and he freezes, blinking down at himself as if he hadn’t even noticed them—and Rose knows he probably hadn’t. She pushes off the wall and rolls up her sleeves.

He beams at her. “Rose,” he says brightly. “When did you get here?”

“I brought you tea,” Rose says, nodding at the mug as she reaches up and picks the end of the wire out of his hair. He stands completely still, letting her detangle him with the cheery look of a schoolboy.

“You’re wonderful, did you know that?” he asks.

“You’ve mentioned it,” Rose says, sparing a moment to ruffle his hair and set it standing on end once more. “Aren’t you roasting?”

“Hm?” He frees one arm and reaches out to tweak a display on the wall. “Oh, yes I suppose it is a little warm, isn’t it? Has to be. Body temperature.”

Rose hums her interest as he launches into an explanation, becoming gradually more animated the more of his body she frees from the wires. He babbles on about incubation temperatures and humidity; about genetic anomalies and something called Time-DNA. Rose takes in none of it, but she doesn’t need to. That’s not her job here. She’s supplied the genius with his tools and his tea (she grabs it and hands it to him mid-sentence to make sure it’s actually drunk) and now she’s here to make sure he doesn’t accidentally strangle himself with the wires.

“So it’s coming along, is it?” she asks when he pauses for breath.

Kara’s voice floats through from the other room. “Five nine one still,” she says.

“Excellent,” the Doctor shouts back. “Keep an eye on it a little longer. Tell me if it changes.”

“Okay!”

His eyes soften and his grip tightens briefly on the mug of tea. He lowers his voice. “You think she’s going to be okay?”

Rose presses a kiss to his cheek. “We’ll make sure of it,” she promises him. “Now; get back to work, Mister. No slacking off.” She smacks him in the chest.

“Yes, boss.” He winks. “Kara!” he calls. “Get out here. I need a grapple-wrench and a doohickey.”

“Coming!”

A mad clatter of noise later, Kara scrambles into the room with an armful of bizarre-looking tools. Her hair is falling out of its bobble, strands sticking to her face and haloing around her head. Her clothes are smudged with oil and torn at the ankle, and there’s a bruise forming on her cheek. Rose steps out of the way and lets her pass, and Kara hardly spares her a glance, already falling into a cross-legged pose by her dad and grabbing tools, chattering away at a hundred miles an hour.

Honestly; two of them.

Rolling her eyes, heart humming with fondness, Rose turns away and picks her way back out of the TARDIS and up the outside garden. Rainclouds threaten to burst overhead, leaving the air with a close, damp feel, threading its unpleasant fingers through Rose’s hair.

The garden itself is on the manageable side of unkempt, with flowerbeds spilling flowers over a lawn that’s overdue a cut, and a comfortable scattering of chairs sat around a cold barbecue.

Martha waits for her in the kitchen, leaning against a counter with a mug of tea in her hands and a smile in her eyes. She nods at the other mug waiting by her elbow. “How’s it going?”

Rose deflates and grabs the mug gratefully, sinking into a chair. “I have no idea,” she admits. “It’s pure chaos in there.”

“I bet.” Martha hums, shaking her head and looking off into the distance. “God, he used to spend hours tinkering with that thing. I’d go to bed on the TARDIS and come back in the morning and he’d still be there, all tangled up in wires and surprised to see that time had passed.”

Rose snorts. “Yeah, well now I’ve got two of them.”

“Lucky you.”

Rose looks up, tension jumping in her throat, but Martha’s eyes are sparkling with amusement, not jealousy, and Rose relaxes into a familiar smile. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “You know, he nearly missed our wedding? Got his mind twisted up in something. Dad had to go fetch him.”

Martha laughs. “That sounds like him. Though I bet he didn’t keep checking his phone for the latest footie scores when he did turn up.”

Rose hisses. “You got married on a match day? Rookie error, Martha.”

“You’re telling me.” Martha inclines her head towards the living room, where the hum of a crowd sounds below the upbeat rapport of a commentator. Mickey’s low enthusiastic muttering echoes through the house and Martha shakes her head with dismay. She can’t hide the fondness in her eyes, though.

They share a smile and Rose leans back in her chair, sipping hot gulps of tea and aching. Her back is practically one big knot at this point, her legs stiff and uncomfortable in every position. She thinks she might know why the Doctor tends to favour younger companions. Less cramp at the end of a fight. She rolls her ankle.

“How are you doing?” Martha asks, a softer cadence to her voice now.

“Oh,” Rose says, looking down into her mug. “You know. Difficult few days. But I’m fine. ‘Course I’m fine.”

Martha says nothing.

The silence stretches between them and Rose’s grip tightens on the mug and the lie fills too much space. She sags. “I’m exhausted,” she admits. “I’m not used to all this—not anymore—but there’s just something about the energy of it all that sweeps me away. This universe… the Doctor… the Time Lord one, I mean—I’m used to the one out there by now. It’s a lot.”

Martha hums.

She gets it. She gets it. Rose deflates completely, slumping against the counter so her chin rests on her arms. “I’m so worried,” she says. “Worried about Kara, about the Doctor, both Doctors. I keep thinking about my Mum, and how scared she must have been every time I vanished off with the Doctor, all those years ago. I never really appreciated… and now I’ll never see her again.”

Her words catch in her throat, and Martha slips around the kitchen counter to put her arm around Rose, and Rose leans into the warmth and she breathes.

“Listen,” Martha says in a low, soothing voice. “You and your Doctor and Kara are welcome here. However long you need—we’re here for you. And I mean it; there’s a decent secondary school just down the road, we’ll get Kara enrolled and buy her a uniform if we have to. We’ll set up the spare room, park your TARDIS in the garden. You need anything, you come to us, you hear me?”

Rose closes her eyes and cradles her mug and she thinks she might just melt all the way through the counter. “Be careful,” she says. “Or I might just take you up on that offer.”

“Good,” Martha says. “I mean it.”

“You’re too good,” Rose complains. With a huge effort, she peels herself off the counter and sits up so she can look Martha in the eye. “Thank you.”

Martha nudges her with her shoulder. In the other room, Mickey roars in celebration, and both Rose and Martha jump.

“Martha!” Mickey shouts. “You gotta see this goal!”

Martha winks at Rose before hurrying off to the living room to catch the replay. Rose watches them through the doorway, takes in how intently Martha watches the telly before whistling and joining in with Mickey’s enthusiasm with a genuine appreciation in her voice. She leans in close to Mickey, settling at his side on the sofa as the game resumes.

Mickey slips an arm around her, and the look on his face, flickering in the light of the telly, is nothing short of adoration. For a long moment, he is distracted from the game, re-examining the features of Martha’s face, a softness in him that Rose has never seen before.

Mickey Smith in love.

So that’s what it looks like.

Rose smiles, finishing off the dregs of her tea and setting it aside. At the sound, Martha moves as if to return to her, but Rose flaps her hands at her and gives her a look.

“I’m going for a bath,” she tells them.

Mickey gives her the thumbs up and doesn’t take his eyes off the telly. “Towels in the airing cupboard,” he says. Then, when Martha tries to move, he tightens his hold on her and traps her in place. “Nope. She can find the tub. You’re not goin’ anywhere.”

Martha pouts over his shoulder at Rose, and Rose shrugs at her. “You’re the one that married him,” she says. “I’ll find the tub.”

She leaves them to it, hauling her aching bones up the stairs, running the water as hot as she can stand it, and easing in to a mountain of bubbles.

It. Is. Bliss.

She melts into the bath until the water turns cold and her toes are beyond wrinkled. Then she rolls into the bed Martha has made up for her and she falls asleep in an instant, her limbs heavy as logs.

She wakes many hours later, when the light outside the window is tinged with the grey of dawn and her husband is picking his way poorly across the room with shadows under his eyes, his hair damp and mussed from the shower, a stubborn smudge of oil still lingering on his forehead.

He gives her a twisted, apologetic smile, and he’s so goddamned rumpled and tired that Rose does nothing but open up the edge of the duvet so he can crawl inside.

He’s wrapped around her in an instant, all long limbs and fatigue. He presses his nose into her neck and she can feel the moment the tension in his body melts away, a quiet sigh ghosting across her face.

“Kara asleep?” Rose asks.

He hums into her hair and burrows closer. One of his legs tucks between hers and he makes another soft noise of contentedness, and Rose is so gone for this man it’s ridiculous.

She closes her eyes and pulls his arms tighter around her, knowing he’ll regret this in a few hours’ time, when his arm has gone numb, but she’ll gladly take that risk.

His breathing settles quickly into a soft snore, and Rose chases the lingering haze of sleep back into unconsciousness, wrapped up tight in the Doctor’s arms—exactly where she belongs.

Chapter Text

Chapter Ten

In the spare room of Rose’s TARDIS, there is a body. Wired up to the wall and pumped full of nutrients, there is a baby wrapped in linen with her eyes closed and her tiny fists curled up tight.

Rose aches to hold her. She aches to brush her hands over the child’s head, to kiss the fine smattering of hair. But she cannot be touched. She cannot be held. She cannot be moved.

“She won’t grow,” the Doctor says, standing in the doorway. He’s rumpled from weeks of tireless work, his skin smudged with grey. “Even after our trip into the time vortex, she’s just DNA right now. She’s destined to become a Time Lady, but she wouldn’t be River Song, or even Melody Pond. Not without the Library mainframe. Not unless I hook up the TARDIS to the Library’s central computer and let her grow.”

Back to the Library. Rose’s insides churn, but she does not flinch.

“So we go to the Library,” she says. “How long would we need to stay?”

The Doctor sighs, dragging a hand through his well-mussed hair. “From what I gather? River Song was over three hundred years old when she died. To return those memories without causing harm? Would take at least thirty.”

“Thirty years,” Rose echoes, a shiver running down her arms and setting each hair on end. “In the Library. With the Vashta Nerada.”

“Yep.” He pops the ‘p’, and his lips press into a thin line as he slumps against the wall with a sigh. “We can’t do this without the other TARDIS. We need the Doctor.”

Rose flinches, remembering the last time she saw the Time Lord, the spark of fury in his eye when he discovered they had taken the diary, the soft agony in his voice when he begged them to leave River alone.

But he’d let them go. That means he has hope.

Besides, if there’s anyone Rose is used to sorting out, it’s the Doctor.

“Where’s your phone?” she asks her husband, wandering past him into the ragged mess that is the console room. “Ah.” She spots the mobile atop the console, sticking out of the small holder, and grabs it. “Tidy this place up,” she says, waving a hand as she keys in the passcode and finds her own number.

The call rings and rings and rings. Rose waits, leaning against the console while the Doctor shuffles around, clearing up wires and stacking up dirty plates and mugs.

A low wheezing noise sounds outside their TARDIS. A vividly familiar noise.

Rose’s heart trips in her chest, even now.

Here he comes.

Rose drops the phone and hurries for the door, throwing it open to find the blue police box materialising next to them, the doors flying open the instant the TARDIS corporealizes. The Doctor flings himself through the doors, and he is a wreck. His trousers are singed, his purple jacket hanging off him, the faint smell of smoke wafting after him.

Close on his heels comes the young brunette who must be Clara. Her blue dress is similarly smudged and there’s soot on her cheek but she’s beaming as she looks around, as if nothing in the universe can sap her enthusiasm.

“Oh,” she says, when she sets eyes on Rose. “It’s you. From the Library.”

Rose grins at her. “Hi.”

“Where is she?” the Doctor demands, his eyes frantic. “What did you do?”

“She isn’t anywhere yet,” Rose says, looking over her shoulder. Her husband hurries from their TARDIS, a lopsided pile of crockery balanced in his arms.

“Ah,” he says. “Hello. Um.” He looks down at his burden and Rose rolls her eyes, moving to take all the dirty dishes from him.

“Explain it,” she tells him. “God knows I don’t understand any of it.”

She turns to fix the Time Lord with a firm look. “Don’t freak out,” she says. “We need your help. Please just hear him out, okay?”

She pauses to grin at Clara. “Good to see you again.”

Clara watches her with curious eyes, hovering close to her Doctor. “Hey,” she says. “It’s Rose, right? Do you… do you need any help?”

Oh, she’s sweet. Rose remembers her old jealousy of Sarah Jane—Clara obviously has a clear head on her shoulders.

“Nah, you can stay here. The Doctor will explain what’s going on. Right, Doctor?”

Rose levels her glare not on her husband, but on the Time Lord. The Doctor says nothing, but a muscle jumps in his jaw when he turns his eyes on his human-ish variant. “Explain,” he says.

Which is great. Rose sighs and hurries to the kitchen as fast as she can, dumping the crockery on the side just as Mickey skids into the room. “Did I hear—?”

“In the garden,” Rose tells him.

Kara is next to race past her, headed for the back door. Martha is the only one of them with any kind of poise, tugging her jacket on and squaring her shoulders before following Mickey and Kara into the garden.

“Are you insane?” the Time Lord Doctor is demanding when Rose comes once more within earshot. “Absolutely not. No. It’s too dangerous.”

“If we use your TARDIS, we’ll hardly even have to leave the box,” Rose’s Doctor replies. “Jump out, hook her up, jump back in, jump thirty years. Whole lot of jumping.”

“Not for us, you matchstick. If we’re off by even one tiny variable, if it takes just a second too long to connect her up, all her memories will burn up and she will be gone.”

“Doctor,” Rose says softly.

“No,” he says, turning on her and jabbing a finger in her direction. “No. And you, Martha Jones, I thought you were smarter than this.”

He turns on his heel, leaving Martha rocking back on her heels. “Oh, that’s nice,” Martha says.

“Come on, Clara,” the Doctor says. “We’re leaving. And if I hear that any of you have set a single foot in the Library, you will not like what happens next.”

“We’re not leaving,” Clara says, planting her feet and folding her arms and looking around her. “You’ve hardly explained a thing—I don’t even really know who these people are, beyond a couple of names. But it looks like they know you, Doctor. It looks like they’re trying to help you. So why won’t you let them?”

“Clara!” The Doctor throws up his hands and growls in the back of his throat. “Why does nobody ever just do what they’re told? Why do I always have a face that says don’t listen to me?”

“Martha Jones,” Martha says, ignoring him and holding out a hand for Clara to take. “I used to travel with the Doctor. We all did.”

Clara brightens, and she leaps past the grumbling Time Lord to take Martha’s hand. “There are more of us?” she asks. “I mean, of course, he’s mentioned—but I thought—hi!”

“You’re taking it better than I did,” Rose says, offering her hand next. “For some reason I thought yeah, he’s nine hundred years old but surely I’m the first girl he’s kidnapped for an adventure. Bloody foolish, I was.”

“Not foolish,” her husband says, leaning over her with a grin. “Hi, I’m the Doctor.”

Clara’s brow creases as she takes his offered hand. “That sounds complicated,” she admits. “Are you like, a family member or something? Do Time Lord families all have the same name?”

“Nope,” Rose’s Doctor says, tucking his hands into his pockets and grinning.

“Oh for—I cut off a hand once,” the Time Lord interrupts. “He grew out of it. It was a whole thing. He’s me, but he’s human. Living his nice boring human-y life. Now, I am living a very non-boring, very exciting life, Clara, and I think it’s time to get back to it. You can stay here with the boringers or you can come with me, because I am leaving.”

“What? No,” Clara says, whirling after him. “None of that makes any sense. You’ve got both your hands! And he doesn’t look anything like you. Doctor!”

“Doctor,” Rose says, hurrying to fit herself between the Time Lord and his TARDIS. “Please, don’t run from this.”

“Not running from anything, Tyler.” The Doctor tries and fails for a wide grin. “Big old universe to see. I’m running towards.” His lip wobbles but he stays firm, grasping her arms. “It’s a grand life you’ve got here, you lot. Time to forget this old madman, eh? Move on. I have. Come on, Clara.”

“You haven’t moved on,” Rose’s Doctor calls out. “You haven’t forgotten a single second of any of it, and you never will, and it burns you up. You can’t lie to me, Doctor.”

“Stop it.” The Time Lord braces on the TARDIS. Rose stays fixed in front of the door, aching at the look on the Doctor’s face. “Please,” he says.

“You can’t forget,” Rose’s Doctor continues. “No matter how far or fast you run, it will always be with you. But if you just stop for a minute and let yourself hope…”

The Time Lord slams a hand on the TARDIS and when he looks up, he is full of all those years of pain and loneliness and fury. “What would be the point?” he demands. “She’s gone. They’re all gone—even you, gone in the blink of an eye and I am the one left behind, always me. So don’t you go all high and mighty on me now, Doctor, with your human lifespan and your human love and your firefly existence.”

“The point is what it’s always been!” Rose’s Doctor says, a growl in his throat. “We need the fireflies—you need the fireflies, Doctor, because otherwise you forget. We aren’t gone, none of us, not right now in this moment. We are here, with the wind on our faces and the air in our lungs. We exist now with you, and this time is a gift. All time is a gift.”

He strides through them all, to the cowering, furious Time Lord. “Yes, she’s gone,” Rose’s Doctor says. “She’s gone and it hurts. I can see it hurts. It burns in your soul and it breaks your hearts, because it always does, but that doesn’t mean you run from it. When has running ever stopped the pain? The only thing that can stop the pain, dampen it, is hope.”

The Time Lord shakes his head, eyes shimmering. “I can’t.”

“Of course,” Rose’s Doctor continues, stepping back and swaying. “You’re afraid it’ll hurt more, in the end, if you hope. If you delay the ache, you’re terrified it’ll just come back stronger. But!” He leans in, close to the other Doctor, looming over him. “This is the secret. The secret you already know. It already hurts just as bad as it can, because you know she died for you. You know just how unworthy you are of that sacrifice.”

The Time Lord flinches away and the Doctor grabs his lapel. “Not this time,” he says. “This time, you’re going to stay. You’re going to help us save her and you’re going to look in her eyes and you are going to let her choose what she thinks you’re worthy of. And it is going to hurt, and this time you are going to face the pain and get through to the other side.”

He softens, his brown eyes devastatingly kind. “But first, I’m going to need you to do the hardest thing in all the universe. Doctor, I’m going to need you to hope.”

Clara takes the Doctor’s hand. Rose grabs the other.

The Time Lord squeezes tight and closes his eyes for just a moment before he squares his shoulders and smiles. It’s almost convincing.

“Well, what are you lot all standing around here for?” he demands, spinning on his heels and tugging on the lapels of his jacket. “Martha Jones and Mickey Smith! I thought you two were backpacking all over the world right about now. What’re you doing letting this lot drag you back into all this nonsense? Come here.”

He spreads his arms wide and tugs them each in for a hug, pressing an enthusiastic kiss to each forehead.

The Doctor is back.

“Clara!” he continues, enthusing with every fibre of his body. “Everybody meet Clara! Clara’s amazing, she’s fantastic, my brilliant, impossible Clara Oswald. Clara, meet everybody.”

“Sorry, what the hell is going on?” Clara asks.

“Hi,” Kara says, pushing past Rose to greet Clara with an outstretched hand. “I’m Kara. Basically, we’re trying to save the Doctor’s wife.”

Clara blinks. “His what?”

“Oi, what’s that tone? Aren’t I allowed a wife?” the Doctor demands. “Twelve hundred years old and you think I never had a wife? Frankly, that’s rude.”

“Well, you never mentioned her,” Clara says, folding her arms.

“I mention her!” the Doctor says. “I mentioned her just the other day. Professor River Song, mention her all the time.”

Clara’s arms drop to her sides and her eyebrows climb. “Professor Song was your wife? I thought she was this time travelling archaeologist villain who kept defacing historical artifacts.”

The Doctor grins. “Exactly,” he says. “Told you I mentioned her. Now, Kara Tyler, you seem like the brains of this operation. Care to fill me in on the plan?”

Kara beams and Rose leans into the side of the Time Lord’s TARDIS, watching her daughter unfurl and explain everything they’ve done so far in their quest to save River Song. The Doctor seems bright and enthusiastic now, waving his hands around like he’s trying a new slapstick routine, and a weight shifts on Rose’s shoulders.

Her heart is still racing from the confrontation, her hands sweaty where they’re gripping at her jacket. For a long while there, she thought they might lose him forever. She knows just how far the Doctor is willing to run to escape the thoughts in his own mind—she ran with him for a long while, and it was beautiful, but the standing still… that was when it became real for her.

Stranded with him in the orbit of a black hole, facing a life without the TARDIS to escape to, that was when she truly knew she loved him, because it wasn’t just about the adventure. It was about him.

Her husband stands across the way, in front of their TARDIS—disguised as a garden shed—his head tilted so attentively towards Kara.

“He is the Doctor, isn’t he?”

Rose startles out of her thoughts at the voice. Clara stands just off to the side, looking over at the two Doctors and Kara, the way they bounce words off each other, the way Rose’s husband finishes the Time Lord’s sentences, building up the conversation higher.

“I don’t get how,” Clara says, glancing at Rose. “But he is. They’re the same, even though they look different. And that speech… only the Doctor can do speeches like that. I never thought I’d see him give the speech to himself, though.”

Rose scoffs. “He’s the one who always needed the speech the most,” she says.

“You’re probably right,” Clara agrees. “He is remarkably good at keeping secrets for someone who never shuts up.”

Rose hums her agreement, watching as the two Doctors lean in close and talk quickly in a language Rose could never follow. The occasional word floats over to her, some new technobabble she’ll never follow, but Kara is taking in every word, even interjecting from time to time.

There’s something big inside Rose’s chest, swelling until it’s larger than she is. It aches with a familiar mingling of pride and terror, and so much love she thinks she might perish from it. The Doctor—her Doctor—looks up as if he can feel the weight of her eyes on him, and he beams so widely Rose’s legs wobble.

One day, she’ll need to get a handle on that.

“Okay!” the Time Lord says, all of a sudden turning and clapping his hands. “Brilliant. Just a quick pop to the Library then. Clara, you hang tight, I’ll be back in just a tick.” He bounds into the smaller TARDIS, the one that houses River’s body, and a short moment later, it starts to dematerialise.

“Oh no you don’t.” Rose whirls and strides into the other TARDIS just in time to see the smaller TARDIS materialise inside the console room. People barrel in after her; Clara follows hot on her heels, followed by Martha and Mickey, the Doctor and Kara.

“He’s going to try and go alone,” Rose says.

Her husband glances at her, his eyes skipping across to Kara, past Martha and Mickey. He hesitates for just a moment, and Rose feels the hesitation inside her bones.

This is dangerous.

But she won’t be left behind—not for this, and she knows the Doctor can see that on her face. She also knows that if she wants to stay, every other person in this room has just as much right to be here.

She reaches out for Kara, grabbing her hand.

They don’t even need to leave the TARDIS at the other end, really. Not for long, anyway. It’ll be fine.

The Time Lord runs from the TARDIS into the console room, coming to a sudden stop when he sees them all waiting for him.

“Ah,” he says.

“You didn’t really think that would work, did you?” Clara asks, folding her arms.

Before the Time Lord can respond; before he can convince them to leave and let him leave them all behind, Rose’s Doctor slams a button on the central console and the TARDIS shudders into life, roaring with noise and taking flight before the Time Lord can do a thing to stop him.

The Library is waiting.

Chapter Text

Chapter Eleven

Rose opens the TARDIS door to blackness. Her torch is a weedy beam barely skimming through shadows and the light that spills from the console room into the darkness beyond is stolen as soon as it breaches the doorway.

A solid vice seems to close around Rose’s arm and she is yanked away from the shadows, back into the glowing light of the Doctor’s TARDIS.

“It’s like they were waiting for us,” Martha says in a low, shivering voice.

A voice rasps from the shadows. “Doc-tor.”

“Fuck,” Kara breathes. “That’s the single most horrifying noise I’ve ever heard.”

“Pray it stays that way,” Rose mutters, just as a figure steps out of the shadows and into the light, and Rose’s chest lurches sideways. She flings an arm out in front of Kara, who gasps.

It’s a skeleton, a walking skeleton in a white space suit.

Rose looks sideways with a jolt. Her husband stands frozen, his jaw tight, his hand still closed tight around her upper arm. Did he know the original owner of that skeleton?

“You have my attention,” the Time Lord calls out, sauntering out in front of everyone. “I’m the Doctor. You’ve read about me; you know I change my face. It’s me.”

“You promised us peace,” the skeleton says.

“And you have it,” the Doctor says. “Nobody comes and goes from this planet without my knowledge—and nobody comes here. You and your forests are protected.”

“Our forests are dying,” the skeleton rasps. “The words… crumble. The pages… rot.”

“What do you mean, rot?” Rose’s husband interrupts. The skeleton twitches in his direction and Rose flinches.

“Dad!” Kara hisses in reprimand.

“Your… face…” the skeleton says.

The Doctor grins. “Oh, I get that a lot. Don’t worry about it.” His smile disappears in an instant. “What do you mean the pages are rotting? The Library has a perfect ventilation system; the entire place is controlled by the central computer at the optimal temperature and moisture to properly preserve every single sheet of paper.”

“Our pages rot,” the skeleton repeats.

“But that’s impossible,” the Doctor insists. “The central computer—”

He stops mid-sentence, horror crossing his face before he whips his head around to stare at Rose and then at the Time Lord.

“The computer’s failing,” the Time Lord whispers. “She’s fading.”

They’re too late. They can’t be too late.

River needs them.

“We can fix the computer, though,” Mickey says. “Right, boss? If those shadows get out of our way, we can help them. Preserve the computer system. Make sure the books are preserved.”

“Absolutely,” Rose’s husband agrees. “You help us out, let us through, we can help.”

“Help us, Doc-tor,” the skeleton says.

“If you want my help,” the Time Lord says, all tension and desperation once more, “you let us through. You keep your shadows far from my friends and let us do our work. If I see a single shadow moving in our direction—”

“You have our agreement,” the skeleton says, turning in a slow shuddering motion and staggering towards the darkness beyond.

The shadows melt back as it goes, leaving long swathes of smooth wood and the faint smell of mildew. Rose breathes out long and slow, the thumping rhythm of her heart steadying just a little.

“Oh my god,” Kara says in a rush. “That was insane. I mean I’ve heard the stories, but you never did justice to just how intense it can be. Was that thing a walking skeleton? What the actual fuck?”

“That skeleton used to be a girl called Anita,” the Time Lord snaps. “And we don’t have time for this.”

He strides from the TARDIS in a whirl of energy, Clara hot on his heels. Mickey and Martha follow them out of the box. Kara stares after them, horrified, before taking off at a run. Rose itches to check on her, to keep her in view, but she needs to know—

“Was it a lie?” she hisses, grabbing her husband’s arm. “The computer thing you said. Your eyes…”

“The computer needs a sentient mind to control it,” the Doctor says in a low voice. “If we pull River’s sentience out of the computer, and if—as I suspect—Cal is gone, then the planet will shut down. The forests will rot.”

Rose watches the tension ripple through his jaw, down his spine. She squeezes his hand. “Okay,” she says.

Then they race from the TARDIS after the rest of their team.

The Doctor lets go of her hand so he can slide over to the computer once they reach the central hub. “I got this,” he says.

The Time Lord at the keyboard doesn’t move. He’s squinting at the screen, tapping occasionally at the keyboard, grimacing.

“Doctor,” Rose’s husband says. “You know as well as I do that this download has to be absolutely clean, and it has to be fast.”

“It has to be me,” the Time Lord growls.

“No,” Rose’s husband says, setting his hands over the Time Lord’s. “You’re emotional, you’re distracted, and you don’t have what I do.” He smiles softly. “That spark of Donna Noble.”

The Doctor blinks, his hands stilling over the keyboard. He inhales in a long, loud, messy breath. “The Doctor Donna,” he says.

Rose’s husband winks. “The Doctor Donna,” he says, wiggling his fingers. “Go on. You trust her, even if you don’t trust me.”

The Time Lord’s jaw ripples with tension, and then he steps away and lets the Doctor take his place.

“Right.” The Doctor flexes his fingers and turns away from the keyboard. “Kara, Rose, you two are on shadow duty. If even one of them ripples where it shouldn’t, you shout. Mickey, I need you to watch this level here. If it jams or sticks at any percentage longer than sixteen seconds, let me know. Martha, Doctor, you need to look after River. The body needs to be kept stable and properly connected while we initiate the download. And last, but entirely not least, Clara. You keep him—” the Doctor jabs his thumb towards the other Doctor— “from imploding.”

“So I’m on babysitting duty,” Clara says with a smirk.

“Oi,” the Time Lord protests.

“Look at you, going all strict,” says a new voice, a familiar rumbling purr of a voice. Rose flinches, twists around, trying to find the source of the voice. The Time Lord has gone stock still, his eyes widening.

“River?” he breathes.

“Well, who else would it be?” the voice asks. “It’s my mind you’ve all come to mess with, isn’t it?”

A shimmering figure steps out from behind a bookshelf, flickering at the edges. Her hair is electric, fanning out around her smiling face in every direction. Her walk is nothing less than a saunter, and her eyes are predatory.

“Hello Sweetie,” she says.

The Time Lord makes a soft, strangled noise.

Mickey whistles. “Nice one, boss,” he says.

River’s smile—if possible—widens further. “Why thank you,” she says before dropping the smile entirely. “Now, what in the name of sanity are you all thinking? This place is crawling with Vashta Nerada, and they’re getting increasingly desperate. You’re all lucky to even be alive. Get out.”

“Oh my god.” Rose realises what’s happening all at once. She gapes at the shimmering woman. “It’s you,” she says, dropping her voice. “You’ve been rotting the books.”

River wrinkles her nose. “Unfortunately,” she agrees. “I made sure all were properly downloaded first, mind you. They’re backed up on a hundred different hard drives, emailed across the universe for their preservation, but it does rather itch watching them rot. Still, it has to be done. Give it another two hundred years and this planet might even be safe for habitation once more.”

“Wow, you’re good,” Mickey says.

River preens in his direction. “Flattery will get you everywhere, my dear.”

Martha coughs, levelling a flat look in Mickey’s direction.

Mickey just smirks wider. “What?” he says. “She’s clearly got taste.”

“Well, yeah,” the Time Lord mutters, fiddling with his bow-tie.

Mickey grimaces.

“Well, not that it isn’t wonderful to meet you all,” River says. “But I think it’s time you ran away now.”

Kara scoffs loudly. “We’re not going anywhere,” she says, folding her arms and lifting her chin. “We’re going to save your life.”

River’s lips twist into the faintest smile. “Everything has its time, sweet thing. Did your dad not teach you that?”

“He tried,” Kara says. “He also taught me that if you’re clever and you’re stubborn, you can change things. You can stand there and complain about it all you want, but we’re going to save you. Right, Dad?”

The Doctor flexes his fingers over the keyboard. “Allons-y,” he says.

Then he begins to type. His fingers fly across the keyboard, ignoring every one of River’s protestations. It’s like a spell has broken in that moment—Rose immediately falls into her role, turning away from the shimmering figure and staring into the shadows, daring them to so much as twitch.

“I’m sorry, honey,” the Time Lord says. “He made me hope.”

“I’m not worth it,” River snarls.

“You’re worth everything,” the Doctor says. “I’m sorry if I didn’t tell you that every day.” Then he hurries back into the TARDIS, Martha hot on his heels.

“It’s still at zero,” Mickey reads out.

“We’re not initiated yet,” the Doctor says, fingers tapping away. Rose squints at a shadow, but it remains firmly stationary. “Doctor!” Rose’s Doctor calls. “Tell me when!”

“Don’t do this,” River says. “Doctor. You promised me.”

“I said I’d protect your past,” the Doctor says through gritted teeth. Rose doesn’t need to look at him to know he’s intent on the screen, entirely focussed, his tongue pressing against his teeth. “Now I’m saving your future.”

“I have no future.”

“I disagree.”

“Doctor!”

“River!”

“You are impossible.”

“Ready?” The clattering of the keyboard pauses. “Brace yourself, River.”

“I hate you.”

“I know,” Rose’s husband says.

“No, you don’t,” says a softer voice. Rose glances around from the shadows to see the Time Lord leaning against the TARDIS doorway. He smiles faintly at River, so much pain and hope and fear and love inside his eyes. “Please, River.”

River closes her eyes and her edges shimmer. “It’s dangerous,” she says.

“You were always that,” the Time Lord says.

“If you bring me back—if you save me,” River says. “We’ll be living in the same direction.”

“I know.”

“You might be stuck with me a long time.”

“I know.”

“You can’t possibly want that.”

“River Song,” the Doctor says, moving away from the TARDIS and walking over to the shimmering ghost. He lifts a hand and lays his palm flat against her cheek. “My Melody Pond. There is nothing in this universe that I want more.”

“How are you doing that?” River breathes. “I’m not really here.”

“You are always here to me.” The Doctor surges forward and takes her in his arms, every shimmering line of her, and he kisses her with such exquisite tenderness that Rose cannot bear to watch. She tears her attention back to the shadows, blinking the tears out of her eyes.

“Come back to me,” the Doctor says. “Please, River. I need you to fight your way back to me.”

“Oh, sweetie,” River says. “With every fibre of my strength.”

A long beat passes, and then the Time Lord says, in a low shaking voice, “Do it.”

There’s a loud clack of the keyboard, and then a short gasp and out of the corner of her eye, Rose sees the shimmering shape of River Song vanish.

Five seconds pass. Ten seconds. Rose stares into the shadows and hardly dares to breathe.

The door to the TARDIS creaks.

And finally,

“One percent,” Mickey says.

The Doctor’s fingers on the keypad speed up. Rose stares into the shadows, every breath shuddering as she waits endless moments between each percentage that Mickey reads out.

They inch towards one hundred, one tiny limping step at a time, until the final number is called and the connection is complete.

Rose whirls when the clacking of the keyboard stops. Kara is crying, still standing stiff and staring into the shadows as if she hasn’t even noticed. Rose’s husband is sagging forward, resting his forehead against the console.

“Get back to the TARDIS,” he says.

“Dad,” Kara says suddenly. “Dad, that one moved.”

The Doctor jerks upright. “Get back to the TARDIS!” he cries, as the ragged skeleton in a space suit staggers out of the shadows.

Rose flashes her torch in that direction, but it makes no change.

“You lied to us, Doc-tor,” says the skeleton.

Rose grabs Kara’s hand and tears towards the blue box. Shadows race towards them. Kara pulls ahead, keeping hold of Rose’s hand, pulling her along now. Rose hears a yelp behind, and her mind is screaming at her to wait, to make sure the Doctor is with them, but she cannot leave Kara, she cannot bear to release her daughter, cannot slow her run for fear of holding Kara back.

Together, they tear across the TARDIS threshold.

Rose throws herself out of the way and turns.

All that follows her are shadows.

“Where’s Mickey?” Martha demands, sweat beading on her forehead as she hurries to Rose’s side. “Mickey!”

Rose can only stare into the darkness.

There is no sign of Mickey. And there is no sign of the Doctor.

There are only the Shadows.

Chapter Text

Chapter Twelve

"No." The word that slips from Rose's lips is soft and dry and hollow. Every fibre of her being pulses with rejection, with revulsion. Her eyes are feeding her lies because this cannot be – this is not how their story ends. 

The wall of blackness does not shift. It hugs the doorway with coiling darkness, with an itching sense of danger and any minute now, any second now, the Doctor is going to burst through that wall and stagger into the light of the TARDIS with Mickey in tow, beaming that old familiar smile of his, laughing at the look on Rose's face – did she really think something as insignificant as the Vashta Nerada could successfully pluck him from her side? 

There is no air in here. The TARDIS is an infinite abyss of twisting hallways and shifting rooms and there is absolutely no air in here. It must be the Vashta Nerada. They're doing something to the air, drawing it out, consuming it, and the Doctor must have realised. He's out there on the other side of the shadows and he's fixing whatever is happening. 

He's fixing it. 

Because that's what he does, her Doctor. He takes all the things that are wrong in the universe and he stitches them together and makes them right, and Rose knows – she knows that sometimes things don't go to plan, but that's okay because the Doctor has always got another solution, another fix. There's always another miraculous escape just around the corner. 

He fell into the pit with the fucking Devil, for god's sake, and then he climbed back out and he found her. He always comes back. 

Always.

She sometimes gets lost from him, but they find their way back together. Because they're the Doctor and Rose Tyler. 

Aren't they? 

The door is blurry and the shadows aren't leaving and there's no fucking air! 

At her side, Martha sags against the banister, hands pressed to her mouth as if she's given up hope. As if she doesn't even know the Doctor. Rose reaches towards Martha, and her limbs feel like they don't even belong to her, like they are a thousand miles away and she can do nothing but approximate their actions. 

Then, "Dad!" 

The most awful scream Rose has ever heard pierces the air, rends the very molecules in two, and Rose slams back into her own body as the horror and loss and agony of Kara's yell collides with her mind like a battering ram shattering her very soul. 

She ricochets into full consciousness at the sound of footsteps, at a distant shout of alarm, and she turns with every instinct in her bones blaring – just in time to throw herself at Kara, to grab her around the middle and drag her to the floor before she can reach the wall of writhing shadows, because Kara cannot survive for even a second in that darkness.

Nothing can. 

Not even the Time Lord Doctor, and especially not her wonderful, fragile, far-too-human husband. 

"No!" Kara's next scream is worse than the first. The girl collapses in Rose's arms without even a fight, her body going limb and shuddering and Rose can't breathe, can't think past the echo resounding inside her own skull, the all-encompassing horror that is slowly sinking into her blood, creeping deeper and more awful with every ragged beat of her heart. 

The slow-dawning realisation starts at earth-shattering and only worsens. Knives carve themselves into Rose's bones and she stares almost without seeing, head turning away from the unmoving, impenetrable darkness, to the echo of new footsteps, to the appearance of the wrong Doctor in the doorway of the TARDIS that Rose built with her husband. 

The Time Lord's movement stutters as he enters the console room and takes in the scene. His eyes fall upon Rose, and at the dawning look of dismay on his face, she shatters completely. 

The noise that claws its way up her throat is more a groan than a scream, rotten and unending and deeper than the darkest pit. It is tinged and tainted by disjointed thoughts that never quite end.

How can I— 

What do I –

His eyes—

His smile—

The body… is there—?

Kara will—

I'm going to—

"Help me," is the only thought she can end. The only whisper of coherence that manages to tear its way through the cacophony of loss that she has become, the only thing she can do for herself, for Kara, for the nightmare that her future has become. She looks across at the Doctor, the man she once loved, who once loved her, and she begs. 

He jack-knifes into action, flinging himself at the console and sending a wave of brilliant light flaring through the broiling shadows, tearing through them and clearing a space around the box. Then he strides past Rose and Kara, past the still swaying Martha, and he steps out into the Library. 

"We had a deal!" he bellows. "If you think after this that I will not tear this planet apart…"

"Your deal was a lie." 

The skeleton has returned, blooming out of the shadows in a mockery of humanity. Rose longs to throw herself at it, to tear it apart with her fingernails, but she knows the skeleton is not the enemy. The skeleton was just a victim and she cannot fucking grab a shadow. 

"You plan to steal the computer’s mind," the skeleton says. "You would leave us without anything to maintain us. You lied, Doctor." 

The Doctor roars. "Do not presume to know my plans," he says. "I told you I would leave you a system of preservation and I would have honoured my word, but now you have killed my friends, just see what I am capable of." 

"Your friends are alive," the skeleton says. "If you wish to see them again, you will provide us a new consciousness." 

Alive. 

Alive. The word burns through Rose like a wildfire tearing across a forest of dead, dry trees. 

She breathes, a long shuddering gasp that fills her lungs and spreads through her entire body, and then she bursts into tears. 

He's alive. 

“Kara,” she says, her voice coming out cracked. “Listen to that. He’s alive. He’s alive, sweetheart. We’ll get him back.”

The girl in her arms shudders, unfurls. Kara lifts her pale, stricken face and looks Rose in the eye. “Mum,” she says, fractured. “Oh god, Mum.”

“I know,” Rose says, tucking strands of Kara’s hair back with shaking hands. “I know.”

Together, they rise.

“No!” the Doctor is saying, pacing back and forth in front of the shadows like they cannot even touch him. “You will release them to me right now.”

“We require a new consciousness,” the skeleton says. “You will provide us with yours.”

“Mine?” the Time Lord says, and he’s grinning.

Rose’s chest warms.

“Now, why would you want mine?” the Doctor asks. “Smartest mind in the Library -yes, okay I understand that. But you’ve forgotten one thing.” He tugs at his lapels. “I’m the Doctor. I’m the most brilliant mind you’ll ever meet, but I do not sit around in Libraries. Just don’t have the patience, really. A million million books and I promise you I will be bored within the week. And when I’m bored, I tinker. Nah, you don’t want my mind messing around with your complex systemy system you’ve got going on in here. Not one bit.”

“Then we will use your friends,” the skeleton decides, and Rose stiffens.

“You will not!” she calls out before she can stop the words. “You can’t. Right, Doctor? They need someone willing. Isn’t that true? You need a volunteer.” Oh, her husband is going to kill her for this. “Someone like—”

“Me,” Martha says, pushing off the wall and moving in front of Rose. “Let Mickey and the Doctor go free, and I’ll run your library.”

“Martha, no,” Rose hisses.

“Like I’d let you do it,” Martha snaps. “Kara needs you.”

“Stop it!” the Doctor says, waving a furious arm. “I am not losing anyone today. Not today.” He turns his fury on the skeleton. “You’re going to do it,” he says. “You have consciousness, correct? You’re talking to me. You care. You can make decisions – terrible ones, but still yours. You want to protect the future of this planet? Do. It. Yourself.”

Kara’s hand tightens on Rose’s arm. “Would that work?” she asks.

Rose eyes the Doctor. She knows all the tells of her husband, the subtle ways he shifts when he lies, the flick of his eyes, the too-stern hold of his stare.

The Time Lord, however… “I don’t know,” she admits. She has no read on him. No way of knowing if he’s bluffing or not.

The Doctor has clearly had plenty of practise lying since she knew him last.

“Go on,” the Doctor says. “You know it’s the smart move. Let them go, and I’ll fill the computer with your mind.”

The shadows shift. The skeleton takes a jerky step back.

“We will release one prisoner,” it says. “Once you fulfil your promise, the other will be released.”

The Doctor’s jaw tightens. “You will release them both. Right now.”

His words fade into silence, into the tension of waiting, and then the shadows shift. They unfurl and move, and out of the darkness comes a figure, stumbling, running.

Rose lets out a soft sob.

Mickey breaches the TARDIS and sweeps Martha into his arms, breathing hard, crazed demons lingering in his eyes. Over Martha’s shoulder, he inspects the faces looking back at him, and his eyes connect with Rose.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I told them to let him go first.”

Rose bites back her response. The venom that wants to drip from her tongue: You should have tried harder.

She smiles, instead. She throws her arms around him and squeezes his shoulders and says, “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks to him,” Mickey tells her. “Only thanks to him.”

“He’s okay?” Rose asks, failing to keep her voice from cracking.

“Yeah,” Mickey says. “Wouldn’t shut up, of course.”

A slight smile tugs at Rose’s lips. “I bet,” she says, releasing him and turning back to the wall of shadows to wait.

The Time Lord looks back at them just briefly. He nods at Rose, and then he walks into the shadows.

There is nowhere left to go, nothing left to do but wait.

Rose has waited on the Doctor before. She’s waited years. She only has to believe he’s waiting for her on the other side, and she’d wait her entire life.

The Doctors will come back. She has to believe that. She doesn’t have any energy left for dismay, so all she has is hope. She tucks her hands into her pockets and she wills the belief into her very being, as if her own belief will be strong enough to bring them back.

Then she turns away from the shadows and the doorway and she slips inside the TARDIS inside the TARDIS, the final member of her family. She brushes her hand over the walls and wonders if it feels her own turmoil. “He’s coming back,” she tells the ship. “Just you wait.”

Her feet carry her past the console, past the peeling stickers Kara covered the place with, past the complex machinery her husband composed, past the colours she programmed herself.

In the side room that once used to be a bathroom, there is a baby.

The child is hooked into tubes and her little face is crumpled and small and scared, and she is breathing. Rose’s own breath catches as she watches the tiny chest move up and down, her eyes tracing the tiny clenches of baby Melody’s fists.

She’s alive.

“Hello,” Rose whispers. “Oh, hello.”

The baby does not respond to her, but behind her lids, Rose can see her eyes moving. And even as she watches, even as she counts the breaths in and out of that tiny body, she could swear the child grows. Just a little.

Her head turns, shifts. Her tiny fists unfurl and grab for nothing.

She is dreaming, Rose thinks. Melody is dreaming of becoming herself.

Rose itches to sooth her, to brush the wrinkles away from her forehead and smile at her until the music of the child’s laughter fills the air, chasing away the aching inside Rose’s chest.

This is why they’re here.

The tears start slow – Rose hardly notices them until her vision has fully blurred, and even then she stands and watches and waits and fills herself with their purpose. The child is hope, and Rose must not lose that, not now. For a moment there, she let herself forget to hope. She gave in to the crush of dismay, and let herself believe the Doctor would ever leave her.

She won’t let herself do that again.

If hope alone can bring him back to her, she will become hope itself.

Melody grows in tiny, tiny increments, and Rose watches through blurry vision, her hands crushed into fists at her sides, her breathing ragged and rough. She watches every single breath of life they have given this child, until a hand slips into hers and she is anchored once more to the universe.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” the Doctor says.

Rose clings to his oh-so-familiar hand, and she sniffs. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, she is.”

Then she finally, finally tears her eyes away from the tiny thing and he’s really there, her husband, looking down at her with that soft, sorrowful look that always brings her back to that awful beach the first time she thought she’d lost him forever.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” she croaks, and then she’s in his arms, breathing in the scent of him, and his lips press to her forehead, his voice is rumbling in her ears and she doesn’t hear a single word of it, but she doesn’t need to understand anything except the truth that he’s here, he’s with her and he’s solid and he’s okay, he’s okay, he’s okay.

She clings to him long after she runs out of tears to cry.

He makes no attempt to move away. He just slips one hand into her hair, playing with its strands, while his other hand presses against her back, and the sound of his breathing is the most beautiful sound in the entire fucking universe.

Chapter Text

Chapter Thirteen

The Doctor’s footfalls are soft but unmistakeable. Rose peels reluctantly away from her husband, still gathering the fractured shards of her heart and remembering how to breathe. The Time Lord stands in the doorway, his shoulders soft and sagging, his purple jacket practically hanging off him.

“Thank you,” Rose says.

“Rose Tyler,” he says with a lopsided smirk. “How could I not?”

He opens his arms, just a little, and there’s a floating unsurety about him that makes Rose’s chest hurt. She strides to him and gathers him in her arms and squeezes him so tight he lets out a little grunt of complaint before his arms tighten around her shoulders and he truly relaxes.

“You silly man,” she says into his jacket. He smells like time. “As if I’d ever refuse you a hug.”

“Seemed busy,” the Time Lord mutters. “Didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Like that’s ever stopped you,” Rose’s Doctor says, leaning back against the wall with his hands tucked in his pockets and an easy grin on his face. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Well. Thank you, Doctor.” The Time Lord shifts, and Rose lets him go, watches his gaze snap to the child in the bed, grown in bare moments to the approximate shape and size of a one-year-old. And the Doctor’s eyes, taking her in, are so soft and sad and full of memories.

“Hello Melody,” he says, the faintest wobble in his voice. “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to be very brave for a while.”

He settles at the baby’s bedside, reaching out to carefully brush his fingers over the scrunched brow.

“It’s done,” he says, not looking away from the child. “Doing, anyway. The crevices of the Library database that used to belong to Cal and River are being controlled by the Vashta Nerada consciousness now.” His lip quirks and Rose shuffles sideways when more people crowd the doorway. Kara slips in between her and the Doctor, and Martha is holding tight to Mickey’s hand.

“Is that safe?” Clara asks. “Having the skeleton thing in charge of the planet?”

The Time Lord smiles. “Safe as houses,” he says. “Well. Barring catastrophe, but I’ll keep an eye on that. River already cut off any external signalling abilities this planet has – fried it all to pieces. The Vashta Nerada can’t communicate, can’t compel anyone to come here, and I’ve set up a cloaking system so the Library will be almost impossible to find.”

“And River?” Rose asks.

“Downloading,” the Doctor says, letting out a soft exhalation when the child kicks a foot and makes a noise in the back of her throat. “The memories are filling her up, one day at a time. Just like she lived them the first time. She’ll need to stay connected to the system, but it should be smooth from now-on.”

“So we just hop into the future?” Mickey asks. “Take the other TARDIS and come back when she’s done?”

The Doctor smiles. “Yep. Nothing to do here but wait.”

“So let’s go!” Mickey says.

“Yep,” the Doctor says again. His hand presses to the bed next to Melody, his fingers pressing into the soft material. He doesn’t look away from the child. “She’ll be fine here. Nothing anyone can do for Melody Pond. Least of all, me.”

He trails off, and Rose’s heart breaks to see the soft, pained look on his face. He’s quiet for a long moment, and then he looks up, blinking as if he’d forgotten they were all there.

“You can fly the TARDIS,” he says, looking at Rose’s husband with lifetimes in his eyes. “Take the others. No need to hang around here any longer.”

“You’re staying with her,” Rose’s husband says. His arm tightens around Rose’s waist. “You realise it’ll take years for her to fully download.”

The Doctor checks his watch. “Yep. At this rate, thirty-two years, ninety six days and, ooh nine and a half hours. See you then!”

“And you’ll stay?” Rose asks.

The Time Lord softens, all at once, lips tilted in a small, private smile for little Melody Pond. “Oh, I reckon so,” he says. “What’s thirty-two years? Someone’s got to keep an eye on her. Keep her safe.” His voice quietens. “And if anyone deserves to have someone watching over her, it’s Melody Pond.”

“On your own?” Clara asks.

“Well,” says the Doctor, straightening up with a smile. “I always say I don’t have time to read.”

“Doctor,” Rose says. He looks up, and she wonders how her sentence was going to end. She might say ‘You don’t have to do this,’ but she sees his eyes and knows obligation has nothing to do with this. The answer to ‘are you sure?’ is written on his face, and ‘I’m pretty sure you’ll lose your mind if you have to sit in the same place for thirty-two years,’ doesn’t really help anyone.

“Will you need anything?” she asks instead. “I imagine… food?”

The Doctor falters. He blinks. “Oh. Um.”

Rose folds her arms. “You were going to stay here for thirty-two years, and you didn’t even consider that you might need to eat?”

He scratches at his chin. “It hadn’t really occurred to me,” he admits.

“Oh my god,” Rose says, throwing her hands in the air and shooting a look at her husband. “He’s not changed, has he? Not one bit.”

“Hey!” her husband protests. “What did I do?”

“So we pop in with supplies,” Mickey offers. “Would that work?”

The Doctor grins and points at him with a delighted spark in his eye. “See?” he says. “Problem solving. You were always a problem solver, Mickey Smith. Yes! Supplies!”

“Or,” says a long, drawn-out voice that sends the Doctor into a body-full flinch. He whirls around as a shimmering figure steps through the walls. The hologram of River Song smiles, her incredible hair haloed out around her face, a long white gown draped over her. “If you insist on this ridiculous plan – entirely unnecessary, by the way, Sweetie – you take the TARDIS, drop off your friends, and carry out your own supply-runs.”

“River,” the Doctor whines, drawing out the last syllable with a giddy kind of petulance. “You always interrupt my plans.”

“With better plans,” River says.

“Well, that’s just – shut up,” he splutters. “Also not true.” He jabs his pointing finger in River’s direction. “I have good plans. Excellent plans. My plans are the best, and you know it.”

“Of course, Sweetie. Remind me – just how fast did you burn through your last few regenerations, again?”

“Oh, you…” He growls and makes an aborted movement, as if he were reaching for her. He turns away. “Fine. You win.”

“I always do.” She smiles, and a flush colours the Doctor’s cheeks.

“Yes,” he says. “You do.” He claps his hands. “Okay! New plan, then. I take everyone home in the TARDIS, then I come back to right now. Promise I won’t be late.”

“Late for what?” River asks. “Sweetie, I’ll be cooking for thirty-two years. I know your steering is poor, but it’s not usually that bad.”

“No,” the Doctor says. “I will not leave you here unguarded. Not for one minute, River Song.”

“Oh, don’t make such a fuss,” River snaps. “Sweetie, I appreciate the gesture, I really do. But this is so very unnecessary.”

“Nothing about your safety is unnecessary,” the Doctor says. He whirls towards River, and it’s like the entire rest of the room is forgotten. Rose slips a hand into her husband’s and doesn’t dare move. Her heart thunders in her chest, aching at the pained urgency on the Doctor’s face, the soft dismissal on River’s face.

“Doctor,” River says. “Look at me. You do not have to prove anything to me, okay? You have already gone above and beyond with this ridiculous plan. I know you. You need excitement, you need adventure, and you need someone to adventure with. You cannot sit here in this dusty, rotting Library on your own for thirty-two years. I don’t want you to.”

“I wouldn’t be on my own,” the Doctor says, a burst of energy pulsing through him. “Not if you’re here.”

“Me?” River laughs. “Sweetie, I’m just a memory. A remnant of a data ghost being downloaded. I don’t count.”

“You count,” the Doctor insists, the last word almost a growl. Energy overflows – he lunges forward and grabs River’s wrists, gathering them up to his chest. “You count, River. You have always counted. And I’m sorry.” He lifts one hand and presses it to her cheek. “I’m so sorry, River, if I ever let you believe that you didn’t.”

He exhales, a long breath, and then he swoops in and kisses her, one hand still pressed to her cheek, his eyes squeezed closed.

Rose aches.

A quiet sniff sounds behind her, and she turns to see Martha wiping a tear from her face. Mickey holds her tight in his arms, the muscles of his forearms standing out.

Nobody dares to move.

“Thirty-two years is nothing, River,” the Doctor breathes, pulling back just enough to lean his forehead against River’s. “It is nothing compared to what you deserve. I have spent more than two hundred years running from you, running from this place, because I was afraid of how much it would hurt, but running never made it hurt less. It only added to my regrets.”

“Sweetie—”

“River.” The Doctor steps back, keeping firm hold of River’s hand. “I would wait two thousand years in this Library to keep you safe. I would burn galaxies to hold you again. I would—” he laughs softly, “I would invent a paradox universe just to make a world where you stay at my side.”

River is shaking. Her hands grip the Doctor’s jacket and tears stream down her cheeks, but she doesn’t blink, only moves her head gently from side to side as if she couldn’t possibly believe the words he says are truth.

“I have spent so long running,” the Doctor says. “Trying not to love you, River Song. Pretending, even to myself, that I can survive you, but I was always wrong. I have loved you, wife, at the beginning of the universe and at the end. At every point in time, all at once, and in a hundred thousand different places. I love you with poison on your lips and blasters in your hands, I love your ridiculous obsession with archaeology – and how your nose wrinkles when I denounce it, just like that.” He beams at River’s disgust and leans into her orbit. “I love how much you hate my hats and how you never, for one second, needed me. Even when you thought you did. River. My River. Thirty-two years in this Library with you is not a chore. It is not a burden, because you are not a burden. It would be my honour, River Song. The honour of my life.”

His voice trails into silence, and for a long moment, there is nothing but the occasional soft sniff and the calm pump of the machinery growing River’s body.

“Well,” River manages finally, her voice a whisper of a croak. “When you put it like that…”

The Doctor smiles, brushing her tears away with a swipe of his thumb. “Will you let me stay, wife?”

“Oh, go on then.” She manages a soft laugh. “You sentimental old man.”

“Always,” he says, lifting her hands so he can kiss them. “I will see you very shortly, wife. Wait up.”

Her small smile grows. “Oh, I always do,” she admits.

“I know,” he says. He swoops in and kisses her nose. “I love you.”

“Oh, you’re going to be insufferable about that now, aren’t you?”

“Yep.” He beams and springs back, finally turning to face the rest of the room. “Well, what are you lot all standing around crying for?” he asks. “Really, it’s like you’ve never seen an intense, heartfelt declaration of love between a thousand-year-old man and his data-ghost wife before. Honestly.”

“You know us humans,” Clara says, her voice rough from her own silent sobbing. “We’re all about the sentiment.”

“Well, stop it,” the Doctor says, waving his hands. “Come on, into the TARDIS. Sooner we leave, the sooner I can return.”

He glances over his shoulder, to where River Song’s ghost stands over her own growing body, the baby growing bigger once more – already almost twice the size it began life as, and breathing smoothly.

River Song wiggles her fingers at him with a smile, and her eyes are just full of love.

“Sweetie?” she calls out, as the Doctor shuffles everyone into the bigger TARDIS. “I love you, too.”

“I know,” the Doctor says, looking back with a wink. But there’s an extra bounce to his step as he dances around the central console. “Okay!” he says. “Back home, the lot of you. First, Clara!” He flips controls and sets the TARDIS into motion – the smaller TARDIS parked in the console room disappears as they do, remaining in the Library.

Rose feels a twinge in the back of her stomach at the sight. There goes their last tie to their universe. The last piece of this world that truly belonged to them. She squeezes her husband’s hand.

“Scotland, you said?” she offers.

He blinks into the room, beaming and leaning into her side. “Kara!” he calls. “How do you feel about Scotland?”

Kara settles into the crook of his arm the best she can with the TARDIS rolling and rocking around them. “Do you want to move to Scotland just so you can do the dumb accent?” she asks.

The Doctor squeezes Rose tighter to his side – on the other side, Kara lets out a squeak.

“I do an incredible Scottish accent,” he says.

The TARDIS shudders to a stop. Clara jumps at the Doctor, hugging him tight around the neck. “Go get her, Doctor,” she says. “And don’t you dare forget about me. I expect you next Thursday, okay? I’ll put the kettle on. Bring the wife.”

“I’ll be there,” the Doctor tells her.

Then she’s gone and the TARDIS hurtles once more into the vortex. Rose clings to a metal railing to keep from being tossed onto the floor and she laughs.

“Okay, the rest of you lot,” the Doctor says when the shaking stops again. “Smith residence.” He glances up at Rose. “Unless there’s somewhere else…?”

“This’ll do for now,” Rose tells him.

“What? Rose—” her husband whines and she elbows him in the ribs.

“For now,” she insists. “You do realise we’ll need to set up identities and all that before we can even think about moving to Scotland?”

Her husband perks up. “Is that a yes to Scotland?”

“Scotland!” the Time Lord says with a wide grin. “You can do the accent!”

“I can do an excellent accent,” Rose’s husband says with an easy Scottish drawl. “We’ll fit right on in.”

The Time Lord beams. Rose catches Kara’s expression, the intense roll of her eyes, and she’s sure her own expression is identical to that of her daughter’s.

Rose drags the Time Lord in for a proper hug. “You come visit,” she tells him. “And keep that phone on you. I still mean it – you need anything at all, you give us a ring. And we’ll be wanting that TARDIS back, Mister.”

The Time Lord winks. “Yes, ma’am.”

“See you soon,” Rose says, squeezing him once more before heading off out of the TARDIS, taking her husband by the arm.

“Rose?” the Time Lord calls after her. “Doctor? Thank you. All of you.”

“Yeah, well,” Mickey says with a huff. “It’s past time you got what you deserve, boss.”

“Look after that wife of yours,” Martha says. “And don’t be a stranger.”

“Martha Jones,” the Doctor says, opening his arms and dragging her into a big hug. “Oh, it has been a pleasure seeing you all again.”

“This isn’t goodbye,” Rose says. “See you around, Doctor.”

“See you around, Tylers. Smiths.” The Time Lord leans against his console and grins, and it is so hard to leave, in these final moments.

Once they’re gone, the TARDIS will be quiet and empty, and the Doctor will be once again on his own inside its walls.

But not for long, Rose tells herself, as she turns away, holding her husband’s arm cradled to her chest and dreaming of the cup of tea and another well-needed bath waiting for her inside. River Song is waiting for him, and this time, she thinks he’ll keep her a little closer.

It’ll be hard to keep secrets after that speech, after all.

Besides, if he tries – if either of them do – Rose will just have to hunt them down and make them sort themselves out once more. After all, how hard can it be?

She’s given him his happy ending. His happiness, rather – she’ll be long gone before any kind of ending is imminent.

Still, not bad for a week’s work.

Maybe next week, she’ll tackle the monstrous task of getting a mortgage. Now that could give a girl nightmares.

Chapter Text

Chapter Fourteen

Rose is folding laundry when she hears it. The TARDIS. She straightens up all at once, the smell of detergent in her nose, a fitted sheet bundled in her arms.

She abandons the sheet. She runs through the house, leaping a stranded rucksack and dodging the coffee table. She throws open the front door – Kara is already there, barrelling towards the garden shed.

“Dad!” she yells.

The shed door opens. The Doctor sticks his head out, hair messed beyond compare, wires slung around his neck, his sleeves rolled up. He beams. “What?” he asks Kara. “Is something happening? I don’t – can you hear something?”

“Dad!” Kara grabs his shoulders and shakes him. “She’s coming home! She’s coming home!”

Rose laughs, leaning back against the front door.

Their own front door.

It has been seven months since they last said goodbye to the Doctor in Martha and Mickey’s garden, and Rose wasted no time waiting around to see if the Time Lord would return in any reasonable time frame. She knew very well his tendency to be late.

So, they gave Martha and Mickey their new address; they moved to Scotland; they enrolled Kara in school and found jobs and settled right back into domesticity. The Doctor is now the world’s most chaotic mechanic, irritatingly effective in his job, but his customers never quite know what random upgrades their appliances will return with.

Rose consults with UNIT – Martha put them in contact, and now she receives bizarre phone calls at strange times of the day and night from a woman named Kate. Her husband almost lost his mind when she first told him about the new head of UNIT.

So many lives out there, touched by the Doctor.

And now here he comes, the Time Lord himself – late as always, but hopefully, hopefully…

The police box materialises.

A moment later, another wheezing noise starts up; Kara jumps up and down, cheering as their own TARDIS appears alongside the police box, disguised as a second, identical garden shed.

The door to their TARDIS swings open.

A woman with wild, curly hair, a blaster at her hip, and a smile upon her lips walks out. Rose cannot help her reaction – she cheers, pushing away from the house and charging across the lawn to throw her arms around River Song.

“It worked,” she says around a laugh. “Oh my god, it worked!”

River laughs, a melody in her voice. “Rose Tyler,” she says. “You miracle worker.”

“You brought her back!” Kara squeals. She tears towards them; Rose steps back away from River, but Kara does not fling herself at River. Instead, she throws her arms around the garden shed-TARDIS, closing her eyes and beaming.

River’s eyebrows shoot up. “My god, you have two of him.”

The door to the police box swings open. The Doctor stands in the doorway, bow-tie fitted around his neck, purple coat neat on his shoulders, hair nice and floppy.

Smiling.

Really smiling. There is a weight to him that has gone – there are others that still linger, will always linger, but he looks lighter than Rose has ever seen the Time Lord version of him. He watches River with hearts in his eyes and the future within his smile, and so much joy that Rose thinks she may combust just looking at him.

“Hey there, Doctor,” she says. “You took your time.”

The Time Lord beams. “Had to take a detour,” he says. “Worlds to see, and all that.”

He spreads his arms, and Rose walks into them, gasping when he squeezes her so tight it punches the air from her. He wiggles a little, and she laughs and he laughs.

“Rose Tyler,” he says. “Thank you. Thank you.”

“Well,” Rose tells him. “It was only fair, after all you’ve done for me.” She untangles herself from him, reaches up and messes his hair. “How were the thirty-two years?” she asks.

He looks over at River. There is something changed about him, Rose thinks. More than the happiness in his eyes. It is – he is stiller than he was. Calmer. Less humming with frantic energy, and more peacefully joyful.

“They were perfect,” he says.

River lifts a single eyebrow. “Sweetie—”

“Perfect,” the Doctor insists. He settles himself in to River’s side, curling an arm around her waist.

Rose’s Doctor mirrors him, coming to stand at Rose’s side, grinning like an absolute fool. A hum of warmth spreads through Rose’s chest, and she leans into him.

“Want to stay for dinner?” she asks. “Tell us all about it?”

“Oh, absolutely,” River says, eyes sparkling. “But only if you tell me all about that parallel-universe hopping you’ve been getting up to. Isn’t that supposed to be impossible?”

“How many weddings are you on, now?” Rose asks.

“Oh at least half a dozen,” River says.

There is a lightness to her, too, that wasn’t there before. She stands at the Doctor’s side, not like she is defiantly demanding anyone tell her she does not belong there, but as if it is simply where she wants to be.

“I expect an invite to the next one,” Rose tells her. “And to all the rest after that.”

River laughs, a deep throaty thing full of sparkling delight. “Rose Tyler,” she says. “For the next one, you shall be my maid of honour.”

A happy bubble floats within Rose’s chest. “Well,” she says. “I should hope so.”

“You’ve changed the setting designs!”

Kara’s shout of dismay sounds from inside their TARDIS. “Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad, come and look at what they did!”

The Doctor immediately flinches away from Rose’s side, his amused expression falling into one of dismay. “You did not,” he says.

“It looks better,” the Time Lord argues.

“I said they wouldn’t like it,” River says.

“But it’s so much more fun,” the Doctor argues, and Rose’s stomach drops.

She jabs a finger in his direction. “I swear…” she threatens, and then she follows her daughter into their TARDIS.

“Oh my god,” she says.

It is awful. It seems the Doctor has decided to take the theme of Kara’s old unicorn stickers and enhance it to fill the entire room. The walls are an array of rainbows; the console shimmers like it has been covered in glitter; the floor is somehow spongy, as if she is walking inside a bouncy castle.

There is also what seems to be helter-skelter winding in and out of the walls – and Rose has no idea where they even go, if they are outside the interior but inside the exterior of the TARDIS. She will get a headache if she thinks about it too long.

On top of that, there are more rooms. There are now three doors that lead away from the console room – four, including the exit – and it in one of those doorways that Kara is standing with one hand on the frame and a look of abject horror on her face.

“It can’t get worse,” Rose says, bracing herself and following Kara to the doorway where, indeed, it does get worse.

“We can fix this, right?” Kara says in a small voice.

“Where did he even get so many balls?” Rose asks.

“How did he put them on the ceiling?” Kara answers.

“Antigravity ball pit!” the Time Lord enthuses, and when Rose turns, she finds that both the Doctors have followed her inside, and her husband is staring at the room with stars in his eyes.

“Rose,” he says, in awe.

“No.”

“But—”

“Absolutely not.”

“We can change the console room back, but—”

“You said and wrong, Doctor.”

The Doctor pouts. At his side, the Time Lord pouts harder.

River lifts an eyebrow at Rose. “Dinner, I think,” she says.

“Good call. Come on, Kara. We’ll fix this later.”

Rose grabs her husband. River grabs hers. Together, they haul the Doctors away from the actual nightmare that is the anti-gravity ballpit in their TARDIS, and back towards normality.

It’s true that what passes for normality in Rose’s life is a little more abstract than most. The house has a few exciting ‘feature walls,’ as the Doctor likes to call them; there are bits and bobs scattered all over the living room; the bathtub is already stained a strange shade of orange that is impossible to remove; but Rose did choose to marry the Doctor, after all.

“We got an air-fryer,” Rose’s husband enthuses as they head through the house towards the kitchen. “I make such good chips. Don’t I make good chips, Rose?”

“Yes, darling.”

“I’m making chips,” the Doctor says. “Wait until you try these chips, River. They will change your life.”

“I’m sure they will, Sweetie,” River says.

“I’ll get the spices,” Kara says, shoving past her dad and diving for the cabinet. “We should add the vanilla pods again, those were insane.”

“Insane is right,” Rose mutters, watching as the Doctor and their daughter manage to turn the entire kitchen upside-down in less than a minute.

River slings an arm over her shoulders. “You and I,” she says, “Must be two of the maddest people ever to have lived.”

“I’m just glad I’m not the only one,” Rose says. “Promise me something, River?”

“Anything you want, Rose.”

“Come and visit,” Rose tells her. “Whenever you can.”

“Try and stop us,” River says. “We’ll be like a bad smell you can’t get rid of.”

Rose leans into her. “You’d better be,” she says.

~~~

River Song keeps her promise.

The first time she and the Doctor pop up out of the blue, on a random Thursday, Rose is beyond astonished. A large part of her expected that she wouldn’t see them again, but here they are, less than a month later, sat around the dining table and swapping stories.

For the Doctor and River, of course, it has been far longer than a month.

Still, there are stories to tell on both sides; of aliens and running and paradoxes, and of mortgages and upside-down garages, and the latest high school drama (and okay, an alien or two).

The floppy-haired Doctor leans into River’s side, gesticulating wildly with limbs Rose is astonished to see are even less coordinated than usual, but his smile is so bright it burns.

And then they come again. Rose is gardening when the noise starts up, the wheezing-groaning racket that has Kara sprinting from the house when she was supposed to be doing her homework, and when the Doctor springs from the TARDIS, he is buoyant.

“It’s Gallifrey,” he tells Rose, sweeping her up in a fierce hug and twirling her around. “Doctor!” he shouts, tipping his head back. “You’ll never believe this!”

“Did I hear the TARDIS?” Rose’s husband crawls out of the shed for the first time all day, oil on his cheek, on his shirt, in his hair.

The Doctor beams. “We saved Gallifrey,” he says. “We saved Gallifrey!”

Rose’s stomach drops. She whirls to face her husband, who has gone still and silent with shock. “What?” he breathes. “But that’s impossible.”

“Not impossible,” River Song says, her arm slung over Clara’s shoulders. “Just a bit unlikely.”

“You—” Rose’s husband looks back and forth between the three of them. “You’re joking.”

Then he breaks into the widest smile Rose has ever seen, and he laughs, and they celebrate long into the night – even Kara, who is not yet eighteen, is allowed a glass of wine (well; wine mixed with sprite after she takes one sip and pulls a face).

Later, when the Time Lord is gone again, racing off to find the planet he saved and mislaid, Rose lays in her husband’s arms and his heartbeat is steadier than ever.

And then they come to visit again, and again.

Rose keeps a place at the table ready for unexpected visits. When they go on holiday, they leave a note on the door, and half the time they return to find the TARDIS waiting on their lawn.

Sometimes the Tylers travel with them, when Kara doesn’t have homework to do (“But it’s a time machine!” she complains. “Yes,” Rose replies. “And if you don’t do your homework before you go, there’s definitely no chance of you doing it when you get back.”)

Sometimes, they go on their own adventures, on the weekends.

When Kara brings home her first girlfriend, they take their TARDIS to the moon, and the Doctor waits with Rose while Kara shows her girl the best date of her entire life.

When Kara is nineteen – the same, horrifyingly young age Rose was when she ran away with the Doctor for the first time – the TARDIS materialises in their garden, and an unfamiliar face pops out of it.

He is Scottish, and angry, and when Rose’s husband sees him, his jaw drops and he circles the newest iteration of the Time Lord with an insane curiosity. “But why this face?” he demands. “You’re not going to start breathing in rock fumes and displaying the TARDIS as modern art, are you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the Doctor says.

In a Scottish accent.

“Please,” Rose tells him, pressing her hands together and staring at him. “Please tell me you didn’t pick up the accent because you wanted to out-Scottish him.”

“Out-Scottish? Out-Scottish?” The Doctor’s eyebrows really are very angry. “I’ll have you know this is my genuine accent. His is some made up twaddle that he pulls out of a hat because he likes to feel important.”

“Sweetie?” River Song folds her arms and smiles so fondly at her husband. “You’re being rude again.”

“Am I?” The Doctor blinks at her. “Am I being rude? River, she is the one who chose to mock my accent, as if this voice and this face are things I could choose! If anyone here is being rude, it’s her.”

Rose grins at River. “Good to see you,” she says.

“Of course it’s good to see us,” the now-Scottish Doctor says. “Living this dull day-to-day, I bet our visits are the most excitement—”

“Sweetie?” River says, patting his arm. “Be nice.”

Then she sweeps past and draws Rose into the biggest hug. “Oh, it’s good to see you, too,” she says.

“I thought you used them all up already,” Rose’s husband is saying, squinting at the new regeneration like it doesn’t make any sense.

“A thing happened,” the Doctor says.

“You know what?” Rose says, rolling her eyes. “I bet it did. Tell us all about it. Do you drink wine, now?”

“Of course I drink wine,” the Doctor says. “Can you imagine, not liking the taste of wine? What a childish, ridiculous palate you’d need—”

And he’s off on another rant, and Rose can’t help but laugh into her hands at the look on River’s face.

“If you need to escape,” Rose whispers. “I’ll hold him off, you borrow our TARDIS for a bit.”

“Don’t you worry,” River says out of the side of her mouth. “I have a perfectly good vortex manipulator. You know, he doesn’t even notice I’m gone half the time?”

Rose sniggers.

“What are you two gossiping about back there?” the Doctor demands to know. “I can hear you, you know?”

“All good things, Sweetie,” River tells him. “All good things.”

When they leave, chasing the stars once more, Rose’s Doctor flops down on the sofa and scowls. “I don’t like him,” he decides.

Rose kisses the top of his hair. “Your accent is still my favourite,” she tells him.

He perks up a bit at that.

Kara takes Physics at the University of Strathclyde. She returns home for long summers, for adventures in the TARDIS, and for lazy weekends in her dad’s shed. She makes friends, and she talks about the ones she left behind.

Between her second and third years at university, she travels.

She comes home briefly, with a dark tan and a wide smile and a new girlfriend. This one sticks around, and not just for the intergalactic date nights.

This one sticks around so long that she and Kara disappear into their TARDIS for long adventures into the universe, and Rose has never felt more connected to her mum than she does when she’s checking her phone and waiting and wondering if her daughter will come back.

She does come back, and she brings the Time Lord with her.

He’s still Scottish.

He’s so much older.

He talks of Gallifrey with a new gravity, and he has a distant look in his eyes when he talks about Clara, and he doesn’t like hugs but he lets Rose hug him anyway, just a bit.

And life continues.

Rose and her own Doctor are not one for stagnation, of course. They love their home, and they are older than they were, but they still spend long weekends hiking through the highlands of Scotland; they visit Martha and Mickey and explore forgotten corners of the world as a group of four; they also spend hours upon the sofa, Rose watching telly while the Doctor reads with his feet propped up on her lap.

He says he’s reading. He’s remarkably in-tune with the plotline of Love Island to be truly focussed on his book.

The Doctor comes to visit with his wife on his arm, and all of a sudden, River Song is dark-skinned and just as frizzy-haired, and wide-smiling, and she has an American drawl that makes Rose laugh right up until she’s facing the end of a blaster.

This River Song is funny, and her Time Lord husband is grumpy, and they look at each other with so much love it makes Rose’s heart sing.

Kara comes to visit with a new ring on her finger, full of wedding plans and thrills and alien gossip, and she stays for an entire month, helping Rose consult with UNIT, regaling her with stories, and shopping for dresses.

The Doctor is gobsmacked to see his daughter so grown.

They go on a trip to celebrate, to the planet Barcelona, and it is delightful (Rose laughs so hard her stomach hurts), and then because it’s them, the Slitheen pop up out of nowhere (seriously, Rose should have guessed from how badly the kennels stank) and they have to band together to save the poor, furious, noseless dogs.

Kara marries her wife on Felspoon, where the mountains sway in the breeze, and she wears a TARDIS-blue dress, and she is incandescently happy.

River Song comes along… with her wife in tow, and the Doctor is young and blonde and female and overflowing with energy like a Labrador puppy. She is a hugger once more, and she gives Rose a grand total of fifteen hugs before the ceremony even starts. She gives Kara a sonic screwdriver as a gift and talks in a ridiculous Northern accent, and she is so the Doctor that Rose loves her all over again.

And then, for a brief moment, Rose looks over the crowd and she misses her mum something fierce. She thinks how thrilled Jackie would have been – and how she’d have thrown up her hands and argued furiously against letting her granddaughter get married on another planet.

Rose’s husband finds her, of course.

He always finds her.

He slips into place at her side and rests his head on top of hers and says, “I miss them too, you know.”

Rose wraps her arm around his waist. “I’m okay,” she says.

The Doctor smiles at her, and she smiles back with a dizzy feeling in her chest. “We’re doing okay, aren’t we?” she asks. “You and me, in this life we’ve built. We did an alright job with Kara, I think.”

The Doctor kisses the top of her head. “Rose Tyler,” he says with all the fondness in the world. “You and me? We’re more than okay. We’re fantastic.”

THE END