Near (1/1)

[earlgreytea68]

Title - Near (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, Mickey
Spoilers - Through "Journey's End."
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. 
Summary - The Doctor and Rose keep just missing each other. 
Author's Notes - I wrote a dwsanta fic for tala_hiding for this prompt: Any kind of AU where Rose and the Doctor's lives keep intersecting but they never actually meet.

Many thanks to chicklet73, who made this better.


On that particular day, Rose took a sick day. She wasn’t really sick, she was just…tired. She sat on her mother’s couch, staring blankly at the reality show on television, and tried to envision herself getting up the next morning and going back to Henrik’s. And every morning after that, on and on and on—

Her mother bustled into the lounge and changed the channel.

“Oi!” protested Rose, sitting up straighter. “I was watchin’ that! I’ve been watchin’ that marathon all day, I wanted to see how it ended!”

“Hush,” her mother said, impatiently, stepping away from the television and gesturing to it. “Look.”

Rose looked. The screen was an image of a burning building. Rose made a frustrated, so-what movement with her hand and looked back to her mother. “So?”

“It’s Henrik’s, Rose.” Her mother gestured at the screen again.

“What?” Rose looked back at the image, taking in the information scrolling at the bottom of the screen. Explosion at Henrik’s Department Store. She edged closer to the television, staring at it in disbelief. “What?”

“You were supposed to be there, Rose!” her mother exclaimed.

“I know,” Rose responded, slowly, staring at her employer, now up in flames. She felt like she couldn’t process this.

“If you had gone to work today, Rose, you would have died,” pronounced her mother, dramatically, and suddenly Rose found herself suffocated into a tight hug. “I’m sorry that I yelled at you about taking the sick day this morning, luv,” she said, sounding sniffly about it. “You must have had a premonition.”

“Yeah,” mumbled Rose, watching flames lick toward the sky. A premonition. That must have been it.

***

Rose hated the commute to the new job she found. But what was she going to do? She needed a job and, as her mother kept pointing out to her, her last place of employment had exploded. For reasons that still nobody seemed able to explain. Anyway, not a lot of opportunity for a shopgirl, and Rose had to take what she could get.

The only good thing about the job was that occasionally, if it was a nice day and Rose was in the mood, she could easily head down to the Thames and spend a little while watching the water flow past. Rose liked to watch the water. She liked to imagine where it was going, where it had been, the places it had seen and would see that Rose never had and never would. Mickey said looking at the water made her melancholy. Maybe he was right.

Rose stood by the Thames and closed her hands around the cold railing bordering it and looked at the water and imagined following it, wherever it might go, wherever it might lead. Anywhere. Everywhere.



It was the sound that made her look up. It made everyone look up. For a split second, Rose thought that an airplane was about to crash. This was it, she thought. She’d dodged death at Henrik’s, only to be killed like this.

But it wasn’t an airplane. At least it didn’t look like any airplane Rose had ever seen. It sliced into Big Ben, who let out a gong of shocked disapproval, and then landed in the river with a huge splash that completely covered Rose. She screeched in automatic reaction, backing away from the river, fruitlessly, because she was soaking wet, and who cared anyway? Because Rose stood, dripping, on the banks of the Thames, and stared at the…thing…that had just crashed in.

“What is it?” asked a man near her, staring at it as well.

All around them, the crowd seemed to be evenly split: people running in terror, and people staring transfixed.

“It’s a UFO,” said another woman, knowingly. “I’ve seen pictures. That’s definitely what it is.”

Rose looked at her. “A UFO?” She looked back at the ship.

“It’s probably just some sort of secret government weapon,” said someone else.

“Doesn’t seem like it works all that well,” remarked Rose.

And then military personnel flooded all around them, clearing the riverbanks and pushing them back.

Rose stood for as long as she could, outside the police lines, trying to catch a glimpse of the activity by the Thames. She never really saw anything, though, and eventually she went home when her mother’s calls became too numerous to continue to ignore.

***

“They’re sayin’ it was all a hoax,” her mother said, knowledgeably, when the whole weird episode was over and the television was full of the smoking remains of 10 Downing Street.

“A hoax?” said Rose, and gestured to the television. “What kind of hoax destroys 10 Downing Street?”

“Honestly, Rose, you really think it was aliens?” Her mother laughed at her as if she was hilarious. A hilarious idiot, Rose thought.

“I was there,” she retorted. “I saw it. It ran into Big Ben and then it crashed into the Thames and, yeah, it kind of looked like a UFO. And what about that thing with the mannequins coming alive and almost killing everyone, huh? That was just a hoax, too?”

“Yes, you know it was. A stupid trick, they talked about it in the papers. And why were you by the Thames anyway?” her mother asked, sniffing her disapproval. “You shouldn’t have been.”

“I was…I don’t know, I was looking at the river.” Rose knew her mother wouldn’t understand, if she said she just liked to watch the water come and go sometimes.

“Looking at the river,” her mother scoffed. “Sounds suspicious to me.”

“Mum,” Rose complained.

“I’m just sayin’, you almost died last year at Henrik’s—“

“I was nowhere near Henrik’s when that whole thing happened—“

“I know. But you were supposed to be. Now you go out of your way to try to get yourself killed by some UFO in the Thames.”

“I thought you said it was all a hoax,” Rose pointed out, hotly.

“Just…try not to attract any more trouble.”

***

She and Mickey never went anywhere. There was never quite enough money, and, if they did have money to spare, Mickey spent it on new video games. Rose was saving her money, but she didn’t know what she was saving it for. A trip down the Thames, she thought, maybe. To see the places where the water came from and where the water went.

To say she was surprised when Mickey proposed a weekend away would therefore be an understatement. She blinked at him speechlessly for a little while, before managing, “What?”

“You’re always talkin’ about goin’ away. Gettin’ away from here. Always…talkin’ about the river and where it goes, or…whatever.” Mickey waved his hand around, distastefully, as if he were shooing away a gnat. “So I thought you’d like the idea.”

It was sweet of him, she thought. It was an impulse he didn’t share and, she knew, didn’t really understand, but he was trying. “Where will we go?” she asked, warming to the idea of an adventure.

“Cardiff,” he said.

Cardiff seemed like less of an adventure than she’d wanted, but it wasn’t bad as these things went. It was a place she’d never been before, and that was adventure enough for her. And she kind of liked it. She really liked Roald Dahl Plaza, with its dramatic, expansive sweep. She stood in the middle of it and said to Mickey, “Doesn’t it feel like anything could happen here?”

“It feels to me like there’s a fancy dress party going on somewhere.” He nodded in the direction of a bloke who was running along the plaza with an old-fashioned World War II great coat billowing out behind him.

“I like Cardiff,” Rose decided.

“What do you like about it?” Mickey seemed less enchanted by Cardiff. He seemed to think it was just a city. A city in a slightly different location than the city they had come from. That was all.

“I don’t know. It feels…important.”

“Important? Cardiff? How?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s not important to us, not in our world, but maybe to someone’s world. Maybe to the universe, Cardiff is important. Who knows?” She flung her arms out and looked at the stars, the universe above her. So much to see, but starting with Cardiff wasn’t a bad start. “Really,” she said again. “Anything could happen here.”

What happened then was there was an earthquake.

***

“This is definitely not a hoax,” Rose said to her mother, firmly.

Her mother looked up at the huge spaceship over hovering over the Estate. Hovering over all of London. “No,” she admitted. “Maybe not.”

“We have to do something.” Rose walked determinedly back into the flat, past the winking lights of their Christmas tree, into the kitchen, where she started pulling canned goods out of their cupboards.

“What are you doing?” her mother asked, watching her.

“I don’t know. Preparing.”

“Preparing for what?”

“To leave?” Rose suggested.

Her mother folded her arms. “And where are we going to go?”

“There’s a whole world out there, Mum. And most of it isn’t covered with an alien spaceship. You should make some tea.”

“For what?”

“To bring with us. Can’t go on a journey without tea.” Rose pushed past her, intending to go to her bedroom to pull some clothes into a knapsack, but she paused at the image of the Prime Minister on their television.

“What’s she saying?” asked Mum, and Rose put the volume up so they could hear her.

“I have one request,” said Prime Minister Jones on their television. “Doctor, if you’re out there, we need you. I don’t know what to do. If you can hear me, Doctor, if anyone knows the Doctor, if anyone can find him, the situation has never been more desperate. Help us. Please, Doctor. Help us.”

“What’s she going on about?” asked Mum. “Doctor who?”

“I don’t know,” Rose said, and shut off the television. “Whoever this Doctor person is she’s looking for, I don’t think he’s going to save us from an alien invasion. All of the stuff that’s happened over the past year—Henrik’s exploding and the killer mannequins and the spaceship in the Thames and that weird earthquake while I was in Cardiff, and now we’ve got a spaceship, and our Prime Minister is on television babbling that she needs a Doctor. We’ve got to get out of here, Mum. I don’t care where we go. But we can’t stay here.”

Her mother was silent for a second. Then she said, “Rodrigo owes me a favor. Never mind why. But we can use his truck.”

***

In the end, they didn’t need to get very far. The spaceship blew up over their heads, and Rose stood in the snow at the Powell Estate and thought. She thought about all the weird things that had happened around her that year. She thought about Harriet Jones on television begging for a doctor.

Following the conspiracy theories online about exactly which doctor Harriet Jones had been looking for was kind of exhausting. Most people seemed to think that the Prime Minister had just cracked under the pressure; rumors that she was in poor health were all over the Internet. Rose wasn’t interested in those. She wanted to know, about aliens all around her and she wasn’t hallucinating them. Mickey and her mum seemed to have let all of the memories fade, didn’t seem as bothered by the whole thing as she was, as if it had all been a bad dream. But Rose knew it hadn’t been.

Eventually she found the websites, the ones devoted to a man called the Doctor, who was recorded as being present at all the most important events throughout human history. At least, according to the websites. He was linked to the killer mannequins, to the spaceship in the Thames, to the earthquake in Cardiff, to the Christmas invasion. There were even photos and sketches of this alleged Doctor, but, while some of them looked the same, they more often looked like totally different people. How could it be one person? The Doctor, an alien who traveled in a blue box.

Rose sighed and pushed the computer away. She was losing her mind.

But, when the school down the street from her exploded, she ran to the scene, just like the crazy person she was, and there, just there, was a blue box. As Rose stared at it, a sound started, like nothing she had ever heard before, and, in front of her eyes, the blue box disappeared.

Rose blinked. Okay, she really had lost it.

A man came running up to her, grabbed her shoulders enthusiastically and shook her a bit. “Did you hear it? You did, didn’t you?”

Rose stared at him. He looked like a perfectly normal bloke, blonde-haired, a bit older than her. And yet, there was a half-wild look to his eyes. “Hear what?” stammered Rose.

“The sound of the TARDIS.”

“I don’t know what—“

“It’s the most beautiful sound in the world, that. It’s the sound of his blue box. Did you see his blue box?”

For a second, Rose debated whether or not to say anything. But then she nodded. “Yeah. I saw the box.”

The man broke out into a wide smile. “So he was here. Thought he would be. He’s always where there’s an explosion. Well. Almost always.”

“Who is?” Rose asked.

“The Doctor,” answered the man. And then he grinned at her. “I’m Elton, by the way.”

***

Mickey called them her “mad friends,” and Rose had to admit that they were pretty mad, the members of “LINDA,” as they called themselves. But they were all nice people, and they had a lot of information about the Doctor. They all had different reasons for wanting to find the Doctor. Rose really didn’t know what her reason was. Just that it seemed to her that enough weird things had happened around her that she should really get to know the bloke who was fixing all of them.

Elton called one day with a tip that he thought the TARDIS was at an old warehouse, and Rose went to check it out, because she had nothing better to do, so why not?

The TARDIS was there, and she stood for a second staring at it in shock. After all that time, after all the photos she’d been shown, all the analysis of its occurrences throughout written history, Rose felt a little like someone had just handed her the Holy Grail and told her to drink from it. She laid her hand against the wood grain of the bright blue door. It felt solid and real and there. She read the words on the sign affixed on the door, words LINDA had studied time and again. Bliss liked to pick through them like they were in a Shakespeare sonnet.

Feeling slightly silly, Rose knocked on the TARDIS door. But, even if the Doctor were in there, would he really answer the door? And who said he was in there? Everything she’d learned from her time hanging out with LINDA was that the Doctor would never be in the TARDIS when he could be somewhere where the action was.

Not that there looked to be much action going on. Unless it was all happening in the warehouse.

It took Rose ten seconds to make up her mind, but then she walked resolutely over to the warehouse and inside. It seemed quiet enough, and she hesitated on the threshold, wondering what she was doing. This wasn’t her, investigating abandoned warehouses. What made her think, even remotely, that it might be?



She took a few steps inside, holding her breath, and then, once she’d gone in those few steps, it got easier and easier to keep taking steps. Everything in the warehouse stayed incredibly quiet. In fact, it seemed like there was nothing in the warehouse—

And then there was an otherworldly roar. Rose jumped, startled, and looked to her right, the direction the roar had come from.

Out of the murky gloom of the hallway to her right barreled a man in a swirling trench coat who stumbled right into her, saying, automatically, “Sorry,” as he straightened himself. For a second, she found herself staring right into a pair of chocolate brown eyes, positioned over a dusting of freckles and under a mop of tousled brown hair.

“Run,” he said. His hand found hers, and he took off, pulling her in his wake.

She didn’t protest, because the roar was getting closer and she didn’t really want to find out what it was. She ran with him. Out the door of the warehouse.

“Okay,” he said, breathing hard and turning to her. “You’d better get out of here.”

“But what’s that thing—“

“I’ll take care of it,” he cut her off, brusquely. “No worries. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. Off you go.” He nodded his head away from the warehouse, clearly indicating what direction he thought she ought to take.

She had to ask the question. “Are you the Doctor?”

He focused on her in a way he hadn’t been before, his eyes sharper on her. “What’s your name?” he asked, which didn’t answer her question.

“Rose,” she said, without thinking to press him on who he was.

“Nice to meet you, Rose,” he replied, and another roar sounded from inside the warehouse. “Run for your life.” He darted back into the warehouse, leaving her standing alone outside it.

And then, unsure what else to do, she ran for her life.

***

“I should’ve stayed,” wailed Rose, despairingly, into the pint Mr. Skinner had politely bought for her at the pub. The latest meeting of LINDA had been moved to the pub. Rose’s despair over how badly she had mucked up her meeting with the Doctor called for a pint or two. Or three.

Bridget rubbed her shoulder soothingly. “He told you to run for your life. The Doctor. Told you to run for your life. What else could you do?”

“Maybe he’s got, like, special persuasive powers,” suggested Elton.

“I don’t think so,” said Rose, morosely. “I think I’m just an idiot.”

“There, there. You have had more of an encounter than any of the rest of us could have hoped for,” said Mr. Kennedy, soothingly. “Now what did you say he looked like again?”

Rose didn’t want to admit that she thought about what he’d looked like more than a girl with a boyfriend really should. She didn’t know what she’d thought the Doctor would look like when she finally came face-to-face with him, given that he apparently wore so many different faces. She would meet the hot version of the Doctor. “Tall,” she said. “Skinny. Brown eyes. Freckles. Brown hair.” Which didn’t do the hair justice. “It was kind of fantastic hair. He was wearing a trench coat.”

Mr. Kennedy was taking notes. “Could you sketch him?”

Rose snorted. “No, I can’t draw.”

“Was he cute?” asked Ursula, and Elton frowned.

Rose felt herself turn a bit pink. “Sort of,” she said, trying to sound noncommittal.

“You’re blushing!” Bliss gasped. “You fancy him!” She said it teasingly, with a grin, and Rose couldn’t help but grin back.

“Well, you know, I don’t…fancy him, but well, he is a bit flash.”

“I can imagine,” sighed Ursula, and Elton frowned more deeply.

***

It was precisely because she thought she might be fancying the Doctor—this person-alien-creature-thing who was so bigger-than-life that he might as well be fictional—that she stopped going to LINDA. Just a bit of a break, she told herself. Focus on her relationship with Mickey, which had admittedly been suffering since she’d taken up with LINDA.

That was why she survived. When Elton called, to tell her the terrible news, about Mr. Kennedy and the fact that he had been a huge Absorbaloff alien underneath it all, and that he had killed so many of the friends she had really come to love, Rose was torn between being glad she was still alive and feeling guilty that she’d abandoned them to a situation like that.

The Doctor showed up, Elton told her. He saved Ursula, in a manner of speaking. He’d looked just like Rose had described, and Ursula had said Rose was right that he was quite a bit of alright, looks-wise, but Ursula promised she still preferred Elton.

Rose tried not to think about her pang of regret over missing another meeting with the Doctor.

***

When the “ghosts” started showing up, Rose mistrusted them immediately. They weren’t really ghosts. They weren’t loved ones. Everyone was deluding themselves.

Rose tried to write letters to newspapers and television stations and members of Parliament, because she didn’t know what else to do. She tried to raise the alarm about the ghosts. But no one paid any attention to the letters of one insignificant shopgirl. She wished she knew how to get in touch with the Doctor. But she didn’t.

So she got her and her mother and Mickey out of London. She forced them to go to the countryside, an insignificant village where she thought they would be safe.

And they were. Mum and Mickey were grateful to her for her foresight.

Rose hated the fact that what she’d done, once again, was run for her life instead of fighting.

***

They had a loud and boisterous Christmas that year. Well, Mum and Mickey did, delighted to be alive, reveling in having survived, the way the rest of humanity also was.

Rose’s mood was less jubilant.

Mickey proposed that night.

Rose said yes.

Then she went into town. She stood by the Thames and watched the water move in and move out, on a journey she was never going to get to take. She was still standing there when the Thames drained entirely of water. But, though she ran up and down its banks shouting for the Doctor, she never found him.

***

There was a hospital on the moon. In the old days, Rose would have gone to stand by its empty space on Earth, looking for a blue box, hoping for a glimpse of a man in a trench coat with messy hair.

Engaged now to be married, Rose was steadfastly trying to leave such things behind. She knew it made Mickey unhappy, to think she was restless, still searching for something other than him.

She knew it wasn’t fair to him that she was.

She didn’t go to the site of the vanished hospital. She watched the blue box in the background from the news reports on television. When the hospital came back, she watched the Doctor, in his dramatic coat, ruffling at his hair, walk to the blue box and unlock its door and close himself inside it. She watched the TARDIS de-materialize.

She turned off the television.

***

“They’re saying that this Professor Lazarus was messin’ around with DNA and stuff. Tryin’ to live forever.”

“Mmm,” Rose responded to her mother, noncommittally, flipping through a bridal magazine.

“Jus’ seems like the kind of thing you would’ve been obsessed with in the old days.”

Rose paused in the process of turning the page, staring very hard at a long, lacy veil.

“You know,” her mother continued. “Runnin’ around, looking for the Doctor, all that stuff. Talkin’ about aliens and what-not.”

“Those were the old days,” Rose said, pointedly, and turned the page.

“I know. I’m just pointing it out. It’s refreshing, not havin’ to hear all about hoaxes from you. You’ve moved on, grown up, stopped believing in all that make-believe.”

Rose stared very hard at what the new page had revealed, which was an advertisement for expensive champagne.

***

Rose got a new job with the Saxon government. It was a time of great rejoicing for her and Mickey. It seemed like a job for them to start building a future around.

And then Harold Saxon turned out to be a complete lunatic.

Mickey and her mother thought that they should run away, out into the countryside, the way they had before. Rose was determined not to run. Not again. The world needed people who wouldn’t run, more than ever. If Mickey and Mum wanted to run away, they were running without her.

Her mother didn’t understand her decision, but Mickey justified it by reasoning that they were safer so long as Rose stayed on Saxon’s good side.

Which was going to be more complicated than they had anticipated, thought Rose, as she watched the Doctor get led past her, destined for one of the Prime Minister’s prison cells.

She thought the Doctor’s eyes flickered with recognition when he saw her, but she couldn’t be sure.

***

It was one of Rose’s jobs to bring food to the prisoners in the cells. At the moment, there were none other than the Doctor. Normally, people didn’t last too long in the cells, certainly not more than a few days. The Doctor, however, seemed to be special. Which relieved Rose, because she didn’t know what she would do if Saxon ordered him executed. She was determined that the Doctor not die, but she had no idea what she could possibly do to prevent it if Saxon wanted it.

It took a few days for the Doctor to murmur at her, finally, as she passed food to him through the cells, “Do I know you?”

She hesitated, glancing at the security guard, who didn’t seem to be paying attention to them, and responded in a low voice, “We met once.”

His eyes—just as she remembered, chocolate brown, intelligent, sharp—studied her closely. “When?”

It was impossible to look away when his eyes caught you just so. “It was in a warehouse,” she whispered. “Just briefly. Just…”

“Rose Tyler,” he whispered back.

She smiled. She couldn’t help it. He remembered her. “Yes. Rose Tyler.”

The security guard shifted by the door, and Rose drew back.

***

Their conversations were snatches of sentences, exchanged during meal times, as long as Rose could get to talk to him without attracting the attention of the security guards.

“What are you doing working here?” he asked the next time he saw her, frowning his disapproval.

She bristled a little bit. “At first it was a job, yeah? Got to eat, and how was I supposed to know he’s a bloody megalomaniac?”

A smile twitched at the corners of the Doctor’s lips, an idea which enticed Rose. She’d like to see him smile. “I can’t fault you for not knowing that initially, he can be charming. However, now that—“

“I thought I could help,” she said, in a rush, and it sounded ridiculous when she said it out loud like that. She felt herself blushing. “I mean,  I didn’t know how, I still don’t, but I thought—I was already here—and—“

“You thought you could help.” His voice was rich and warm. He had a lovely voice. And it sounded like he didn’t think she was crazy.

She lifted her eyes to his, which was a dangerous thing, she was quickly learning, because he had eyes that she got lost in, eyes that made her unable to move, because all she wanted to do was sit there and try to see into the faraway depths of them. But she met his eyes and said, firmly, “I’m done running for my life, Doctor.”

The security guard coughed.

***

“You should never stop running for your life,” the Doctor said the next day. “Standing still, it…”

“It what?” Rose arranged his food in his cell as if he were at a five-star restaurant, taking special care. She wasn’t sure if she did it to buy time, in case the security guard grew suspicious over how long she spent delivering his food, or if she did it because she felt like he deserved a five-star meal, even in his prison cell.

He was silent long enough that she didn’t think he was going to respond, so that when he did it caught her off-guard. “It kills you.”

She looked up at him in surprise. “No, it doesn’t.”

He was solemn as he looked at her. “You can’t stop running, Rose. If you stop running, you’ve given up.”

“I didn’t say I’d stopped running,” she pointed out. “I said I’d stopped running for my life.”

***

“I think I take your point,” the Doctor said, the next time she came with the food.

“It’s just, you know, as I said, I want to try to help. Isn’t that what you do?”

The Doctor snorted. “Not very much from here.”

“You can’t help that. And I can’t help you help that, either. I have no idea how to get you out of here.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to ever do anything so foolhardy as to try to break me out of here, Rose,” he said, firmly.

“I won’t let him kill you, either,” she retorted, just as fierce in her conviction as he was.

The Doctor regarded her for a very long moment, his expression inscrutable. He said, eventually, “He won’t kill me.”

***

Rose started the conversation the next time. “Why won’t he kill you?”

“Because that would be too easy. He has another plan in mind.”

“What other plan?”

“I’ve no idea. But don’t worry. I have plans of my own.”

“What plan?”

“It’s a complicated, timey-whimey sort of plan.”

Rose regarded the food she’d brought for him. And then she said, “Do you have any requests? Dinner-wise? I can maybe talk to the cook.”

***

The security guard was distracted. There was some sort of altercation happening somewhere else, and the prison was unguarded. Not that the Doctor could go anywhere, she knew was the thinking, but when she arrived with his food and found no guard outside the door she was delighted. They could talk, for a while, for who knew how long. Certainly longer than just a few sentences.

He smiled at her when she walked in with the tray of food, and she wanted to think that he’d had the same thought.

“Where is everyone?” he asked, as she walked over to his cell.

“No idea.”

He looked a bit crestfallen. “I thought you’d engineered this whole thing.”

She grinned at him. “Not this time. Maybe next time.” It had never occurred to her to engineer them some alone time, but now that the Doctor had suggested it, it seemed like the most brilliant idea ever. And one that he seemed to like the sound of, too.

She slid the food through to him and then stood awkwardly by the cell, unsure what to do.

“Welllll,” he said. “Have a seat.” He nodded toward the floor outside of his cell, and took his own advice, sitting down inside the cell and leaning back against the bars.

She sat down outside the cell and leaned back against the bars as well, to his right, so that they weren’t exactly back-to-back and could see each other while they talked.

He broke off a piece of bread and dipped it in the tomato soup she’d brought him.

“How do you know the Prime Minister?” she asked, watching him.

“It’s a long story.” He bit off a piece of bread and chewed it thoughtfully. “I suppose the short version is that we went to school together.” He dunked the bread in the soup again. “How do you know me?”

“You’re the Doctor.”

“I know. How do you know that? You’ve always known it, and I don’t understand how. When we met that day, in the warehouse, was it the first time you’d met me?”

She bristled a bit. As if she were that unmemorable? “Do you ever remember meeting me before?”

“No. I don’t. But things don’t always go in the right order for me.”

“Oh,” she realized. “Right. Time travel.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” He sounded frustrated now.

“There was this group, I belonged to for a bit. They knew a bunch of stuff about you.”

He thought, munching on the crusty bread. “LINDA?” he guessed, eventually.

“Yeah.”

He was silent for a second, mopping up more soup. When he spoke again, his voice was more somber. “How’d you survive that?”

“I’d…” She cleared her throat. “I’d quit the group by then.”

“Quit?” he echoed.

“Yeah, I…” She looked away from him, fiddling with the hem of the ridiculous French maid outfit the Prime Minister demanded all the maids wear. “I thought, you know, it was time to grow up. Stop chasing you all over.”

“Why were you chasing me all over to begin with? It’s just that not many people know who I am, not many people who haven’t met me, that is.”

She risked a glance up at him. As she’d suspected they would be, his eyes were focused on her, his meal apparently forgotten. The thing about his eyes was she really could never look away from them. “You should eat,” she managed to say, softly, but she just about managed it, and she didn’t mean it at all, because if he went back to eating, he would look away from her, and she didn’t really want that. She liked his gaze. It was the silliest thing, the most foolish thing, but she liked the feel of his gaze.

“How’d you have any idea, to ever even start looking for me?” he asked, just as softly.

“I…used to work at Henrik’s.”

“Henrik’s,” he repeated, without recognition.

“Yeah, it…blew up. A while ago now. The night that all the mannequins came to life.”

“Oh. Henrik’s.”

“And then I was standing by the Thames when the spaceship crashed. And the earthquake in Cardiff—“

“You were there, too?” His gaze on her was growing more and more focused, and more and more unreadable. Not that he was ever anything close to being an open book.

“Yeah. And then on Christmas—“

“Were you on a rooftop?” He asked it grimly, mouth set in a firm line.

“No,” she said. “None of us were. I got us out of the city, actually. But the Prime Minister, she was asking for you, and there were all these strange things going on, and I started poking around, and that’s how I found LINDA.”

The Doctor leaned closer, as close as he could get with the bars between them, still studying her, and she leaned instinctively as close to him as she could get with the bars between them. It was ridiculous, because she couldn’t really keep him in focus, that close to him.

“Rose Tyler,” he murmured. “You’ve been at the center of everything.”

She felt herself turn pink. “Not at the center,” she corrected him. “Just…sort of…there.”

“There is no one who has ever been anywhere who has just been ‘sort of there,’” he sniffed, disdainfully, and then backed up, enough so that he was back in focus. He stopped looking at her, turning back to his food and remarking, “So. You and I have been just missing each other all over space and time.”

She thought that was far overstating what had been going on. “Sort of.”

“No ‘sort of’ about it.” He pointed a piece of bread at her, looking comical and threatening all at once. “Why are you so determined to underplay this?”

“Why are you so determined to make such a big thing out of it?” she retorted, hotly.

He was silent for a moment, once again studying her, and then he said, slowly, “I don’t…I don’t often run into people more than once. I mean, it happens sometimes, very occasionally, but not…It’s noteworthy to me, that I’ve met you this way, twice. Some people spend their whole lives looking for me and never find me. And you’ve been…near me…all along.”

She didn’t really know what to say to that, not when he said things like that and looked at her like that. She thought she needed to lighten the mood, and tried to grin. “Well. When you put it that way.”

He leaned over suddenly, startling her, threading his hand through the bars and taking hold of her hand, intertwining their fingers firmly together. She gasped in shock and stared down at her hand, holding his, being held by his.

“Look at that,” he marveled, sounding as delighted as a little boy. “Even our hands fit.”

It was such a ridiculous thing to say. All hands fit. She wanted to protest the statement. But she couldn’t. Because…they did fit. His hand was the rightest hand she’d ever held, which made no sense, because it was just a hand, five fingers—no, four fingers and a thumb—and a palm pressed against hers, and a pulse throbbing at his wrist, up against her own. They were just holding hands, and it was kind of amazing. She never wanted to let go. She never wanted him to let go of her.

He had grabbed her right hand. On her left, the hand not being held by him, Rose felt the weight of Mickey’s diamond pressing against her.

With another gasp of reaction—Mickey. How had she forgotten Mickey?—she pulled her hand out of his.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, in alarm.

She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at him, not now, she couldn’t take the risk that she might get lost in his eyes and unable to move. “I have to go.” She leaped to her feet, adjusting her skirt.

“What? Why? Is the guard coming back?”

“I have to go,” she said again, and ran away from the cell, out of the room. She didn’t stop running for a while.

***

It was running for her life, running from the Doctor. That’s what it was. Exactly what she’d vowed not to do.

So she forced herself not to wriggle out of bringing him his food again. She could handle this. It wasn’t fair to Mickey if she couldn’t handle a conversation with an attractive man. It was Mickey she loved, she just had to remember that.

“Hi,” she said to him, brightly, smiling as if nothing had happened.

He frowned. “What happened?”

It would be silly to pretend she didn’t know what he meant. “Nothing.”

“Rose—“

“Nothing happened.” That had to be the truth, because otherwise, well, then she really didn’t know what she was doing. She had a perfectly good fiancé at home. A human fiancé. One who loved her, who was steady and reliable and didn’t change his appearance and flit through time and end up in prison cells. “Enjoy your dinner.” She smiled at him again, but it felt pasted on her face, it actually hurt her muscles to keep it in place.

***

He was leaning against the bars of his cell the next night, his arms crossed and his expression sardonic. “We never talk anymore,” he drawled, when she came up with the food.

“Don’t be silly,” she said.

“Is it the Master?”

“Who?”

“The Prime Minister,” he clarified, impatiently. “Has he threatened you?”

She shook her head.

“What has he done?” he persisted.

“It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him,” she assured him. “It was…” She shook her head again and left.

***

The next night, she stopped before going into the row of cells, and she said to the security guard, “I’ll give you twenty quid if you give me ten minutes with the prisoner.”

The guard snorted. “Yeah. Twenty quid. That’ll totally be worth it when he executes me for letting the bloke escape.”

Rose shook her head. “No escape. You can stand right here the whole time. Just let me have ten minutes to talk to him.”

“Talk to him about what?” he asked, suspiciously.

Rose hesitated. “The stars.”

The security guard stared at her incredulously. Then he shrugged. “Fine. Ten minutes to talk about the stars. But if I think someone’s coming, it’s less than ten minutes. And this is a one-time thing.”

Rose nodded her agreement and walked into the row of cells.

He was sitting up against the back wall, and he was looking at her but he didn’t say anything. She made a big show out of sliding the food through to him. And then she sat on the floor, leaning against the bars. His eyebrows rose upward in evident surprise.

“The thing is,” she said, her voice trembling a bit as she admitted it, “I think I like…running.”

He didn’t say anything, but he kept his eyes on her and she kept going, into his silence.

“I think I like…I think it’s my instinct to…The water in the Thames, it comes and goes, comes and goes, and I…I used to jus’ stand there and…want to be water. I want to know what’s around the bend. I want to…I want to run. I can’t sit still. I don’t know why I can’t.” She was surprised by how upset she was, she realized she was close to tears.

“Why do you want to?” he asked, gently.

“I don’t know.” She turned away from him, leaned her back against the bars and pulled her knees up into her chest, buried her face against them. It was the biggest secret of her life, this, that sitting still with Mickey was never going to make her happy.

“Rose.” His voice was next to her ear, and she realized he must have moved. “There are people who sit still, and there are people who run. There’s no shame in that.”

“But it’s not an option.” She forced her tears back inside her, looked up and at him. “It’s not an option for me.”

“Why not?”

She laughed harshly. “Because where would I go? Do you know how hard I’ve worked, and look at where I’ve gotten: here.” She gestured to her outfit, to the row of prison cells. “The farthest I’ve ever gotten is Cardiff. All that water, coming and going, and I have no idea where it comes from and where it goes to, and I never will.”

He was silent for a long moment, and she wondered briefly if she’d offended him. “There are worse places than Cardiff,” was what he said.

She sighed and closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the bars. “Maybe. I guess you’re right.”

“What I mean is: there are worse places than Cardiff, for starting an intergalactic trip. Full of rift energy, it fires up the spaceships. And the time machines.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, wearily.

“Do you know how many stars there are, Rose Tyler?”

She humored him. “How many?”

“More than I could ever take you to.”

There was something in his voice that made her open her eyes, look at him, sit up slowly. He was serious, with what he was saying. Serious.

“We could spend your whole life adventuring, Rose.” His voice was low with conviction, his eyes deep with promise. “Every day, every minute, every second, and never exhaust what the universe has to offer. We can follow the Thames from end to end, and the Nile, and the Amazon, and the Great Jundisteep on the planet Throxul.” He shifted even closer. “Do you know what we would do?”

“What?” she whispered.

“We would run,” he whispered back.

For a long moment, through the bars between them, Rose regarded the Doctor. And then, through the bars, she took his hand.

***

She broke it off with Mickey that night. It was terrible, and hurt more than anything she’d ever done, and guilt consumed her, but when the deed was done, when the ring was off, she felt happier than she had in a very long time. She felt like she was doing something right, finally.

And then, when she went to work, when it was time to bring him his food, she was nervous. What if he hadn’t meant it? How was he going to get out of prison, anyway?

She brought him his food and she whispered, anxiously, “Did you mean it?”

“Did I mean what?”

Well, that wasn’t the most promising reply ever. “About us…running.”

He looked surprised, momentarily distracted from his meal. “Yes. Of course I meant it.”

“Okay.” She nodded, her mind made up. “Then I want to. I want to go with you.”

His smile was tender and gentle. “I want you to. Rose…” He walked over to her and looked down at her for a second.

“What?” she asked.

He sighed and shook his head. “Nothing.”

She let it go. “How are we going to get you out of here?”

“’We’ are not going to do anything.”

“Doctor—“

“I have a plan in place, remember? Trust me.”

“How long is this plan going to take?”

“As long as it needs to take.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“No,” he agreed, cheerfully. “It’s not.”

“You’re going to be annoying to travel with.”

“Can you wait?”

She grinned. “Frankly, no.”

“Excellent, then.” He looked down at her for a very, very long moment, and she wished she could read the expression on his face. He looked…regretful.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, fearfully.

“Other than the fact that I’m imprisoned?” he asked, dryly.

“But you said you had a plan for that.”

“I do have a plan. It’s a…It’s a good plan. And it’s already been put into action, it’s already moving forward, it…I have to find a way to stop it.”

“What? Why?”

“Because…Because there’s a side effect to the plan that I can’t bear.”

“Listen to me.” She reached out, grasped his hand. All that rightness again. “You get yourself free. We’ll figure out the rest.”

He looked down at their joined hands. “I’m going to fix this, Rose.” He said it fiercely, all determined promise, and looked up at her. “I can do anything.”

And she smiled at him. “I believe you.”

***

It was shortly after that that they captured Jack Harkness. They gave him the cell next to the Doctor. He was friends with the Doctor, apparently, and it was a sign of the Prime Minister’s overconfidence that he didn’t bother to separate them in any way.

Rose felt a bit shy around Jack, didn’t know exactly how she should act. She got the feeling that Jack didn’t quite approve of her. The security guard told her that the two prisoners spent a great deal of time quarrelling; she hoped it wasn’t about her.

She brought the Doctor and Jack their food one day. The Doctor was pacing around his cell, and Jack was watching him, his face impassive. After she slid his food through, the Doctor stopped and walked up to her, stood just beyond her, on the other side of the bars.

“You’re not going to remember,” he said.

“Remember what?” she asked, confused.

“All of this. The whole thing. I can’t find a way around it. You’re not going to remember.”

She sent him a puzzled smile. “Don’t be absurd. How could I ever forget all this?”

***

Saxon captured Martha Jones that night.

***

The following day, Rose sat in her mother’s flat and looked through bridal magazines.

***

That Christmas, a spaceship nearly crashed into Buckingham Palace. Rose wasn’t in London. She and Mickey and Mum, like everyone else, had fled the city. They had a quiet holiday in the countryside.

Rose watched the news reports and tried not to think of the Doctor.

She went on a diet for her wedding, but the old-fashioned way. None of this Adipose stuff for her. She didn’t trust it.

Turned out she was right not to.

But she still didn’t go looking for the Doctor.

She and Mickey were having an argument over her inability to set a wedding date. They were standing on either side of the car, shouting over the roof of it at each other, which was the only reason why they weren’t in the car when ATMOS activated into killing mode.

Rose called off the engagement that night. She didn’t know what else she was going to do with her life, but it seemed to her there had to be something more.

She sat on her bed and looked out at the stars. More than he could ever take her to. But the question was who? Who was taking her to the stars?

***

One night Rose dreamed of the Doctor. She dreamed he pressed against her, and he was so real: the scratch of his suit, the weight of his form, his hands intertwined with hers. She gasped against him, her nose pressed into the smooth silk of his tie. He smelled fresh and dusty all at once, and she thought, This is what starlight smells like. She squeezed his hands, and lifted her head to look at him, and his eyes was dark and fathomless. He leaned down and kissed her, a slide of tongue, a press of lips. She gasped again, kissing him harder, their bodies in alignment—

She woke with a start, throbbing for him, hot and cold all at once, breathless from an arousal that had never happened.

That day planets showed up in Earth’s sky, and Rose left home. She went in search of the Doctor.

***

She found him utterly by chance, when she’d given up, and it had started to rain, and she had no idea what part of London she was in anymore. The planets were back in alignment—or, at least, out of the sky—and everything was resolved except for the ache deep inside her, and maybe the ache would never be resolved, maybe it would just always be there, and she would just have to learn to live with it—

And then there was the blue box. The TARDIS, she recalled, from her days with LINDA.

She stood in the pouring rain, her mouth hanging open and raindrops dripping off her nose. She was sure she looked very attractive when the Doctor walked out of a nearby house, caught sight of her, and stopped dead.

He was at least wearing a trench coat, so he was a little more dressed for the weather than she was, but he had no umbrella, and the rain flattened his hair over his head. He walked slowly over to her, looking astonished at the sight of her, which made little sense.

She wished she could think how to start, what to say. She’d spent all day looking for him and had never thought what she was going to say when she found him. He just kept looking at her, his mouth hanging open, too. Why did he look so shocked to see her? It made no sense to her.

“I thought you might need some help, but it looks like you’ve got it sorted,” she said, finally, feeling like an idiot.

“Rose,” he said.

She blinked in surprise, and then said, pleased, “You remember!”

“I remember…everything. When’s the last time we saw each other?”

She blinked again, this time in confusion. “At the warehouse, remember? There was a—“

He sighed, cutting her off. “I remember so much more than you do.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. She stood in the rain, hesitating. “Anyway,” she said, finally, “I thought—“

He did something that caught her off-guard, reaching out and entwining his hand into hers. Rose stopped talking, staring at their clasped hands, at how incredibly perfect that felt.

“We fit,” she breathed. She looked up at him.

He smiled, creasing lines around his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “We fit.”

Rose took her free hand, closed it into his lapel, pulled him down, and kissed him.