Chapter Text
Rose Tyler-Noble is sitting on an unfamiliar sidewalk in a universe she hasn’t seen in years, gasping for breath between her sobs.
In the blink of an eye, she’s gone from Bad Wolf Bay in the parallel universe, the universe where she loved freely and was loved in return, where she had a family and a husband who meant more to her than anything else, to— well, she’s not really sure, what with how unpredictable the dimension cannon can be. She probably ought to be figuring it out, but all the fight has gone out of her. She’s lost so much, all in service of feeling better, but it all seems useless when the only thing she can feel is that loss. It crashes over her, weighing her down, and she gives up on trying to fight it, curling in on herself and trying her hardest not to make a scene.
She doesn’t know long she sits like that, consumed with grief, sitting on concrete, leaning against a brick wall. It might be minutes, but it might be hours. All she knows is that time passes, and then there’s a voice, calling out to her in clear Yorkshire-accented English.
“Are you all right?”
Rose looks up, wiping at her eyes and squinting against the sunlight. A woman is running towards her, about her age, with brown skin and a long black braid, wearing a long-sleeved button-up and holding a leather jacket in one arm. Her face is open, friendly, but unfamiliar.
“I’m fine.” Rose pushes herself unsteadily to her feet, using all the strength she can muster to keep herself stable and standing. She’s painfully aware of how not-fine she must look: her hair is a mess, her eyes red, tear tracks down her face. “Just having a bad day.” She almost adds something else, but another wave of grief washes over her, and she knows if she opens her mouth again she’ll be overwhelmed with tears.
“You sure?” The woman looks Rose up and down. “‘Cause you don’t look fine.”
Rose takes a deep breath. She leans against the brick wall of the building next to her, trying to pretend the world isn’t spinning around her. “Just a bad day,” she repeats. She doesn’t exactly think this woman would believe her if she explained why.
The woman hesitates, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “D’you need anything?” she finally asks. “I’m here with a friend, we could— help you get somewhere, if you need.”
Rose closes her eyes for a long moment, trying to ward off another wave of grief.
“I haven’t got anywhere to go,” she admits, her voice quiet. She scrambles, trying to think— where could she go? She could find Jack. He’s in Cardiff, probably. “Unless— how far are we from Cardiff? Wales?”
The woman stares at Rose for a long moment, her eyes traveling from Rose’s face to the dimension cannon still hanging around her neck. Her lips part, some kind of understanding settling on her face. “Mate, we’re in Italy,” she says. “You’re a long way off. How’d that happen?”
Rose shakes her head. It’s a mistake: the world spins even more around her, and she catches herself on the wall. “It’s a long story,” she says.
The woman glances behind her before turning back to Rose. “Well, my friend and I can help you, if you need it. We’re just having lunch around the corner.” She holds up the leather jacket that’s slung over her arm. “I only came around this way to put away my coat. Thought it’d be colder.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” Rose said, pressing herself against the wall to give the woman space to pass.
The woman stands still for another moment before saying, “I’ll be right back out, all right? You can eat with us and everything.”
Rose nods.
“I’m Yaz, by the way,” the woman adds. “Yasmin Khan, technically, but friends call me Yaz.”
“I’m Rose,” Rose says. “Are we friends, then?” She needs to sit down— she’s getting dizzy enough that she’s losing her filter. And the sun beating down on her isn’t helping.
“Sure,” Yaz says. “Friends.” She gives Rose a wide, honest smile. “And as your friend, I’ll be back in a second.”
She moves past Rose. Rose’s eyes follow her as she goes down the street, approaching—
The breath leaves Rose’s body. It feels like a punch in the chest, sending her to the ground. This isn’t what she wanted— she’s not ready— she thought she’d have years before she’d have to confront that blue box again, with its solid frame and steady glow.
Yaz has disappeared through the doors, oblivious to Rose’s panic, and Rose tries to get to her feet, trying to figure out a way to escape before Yaz comes back out of the TARDIS. But when she pushes off the wall and tries to walk unsupported, she realizes she can’t— she’s too dizzy, too achy, too exhausted— and she leans back against the wall, settling instead for inching away from the blue box.
And then there’s a cry from down the street, another Northern accent.
“Yaz! We’ve got to go!”
Rose turns her head to see a woman with a blonde bob and a long gray coat over a striped shirt. Rose has never seen her before, but the TARDIS— the fashion— recognition rushes through Rose, pounding in her ears. Fear grips her chest. Not yet, she chants to herself. Not now. She shrinks against the wall, hoping the woman won’t see her.
“Major temporal disturbance,” the woman adds, although now she seems to be talking more to herself than to Yaz. She hasn’t seen Rose yet, and Rose presses herself further against the wall, turning her head to the side and letting her hair fall across her face, pretending that if she just wishes hard enough, she’ll become invisible.
She has no such luck.
She doesn’t dare watch as the woman comes closer, each footstep echoing in Rose’s ears, but then the footsteps stop, and Rose knows her number’s up. She hears the TARDIS doors creak open again, presumably Yaz stepping back out, and she sighs to herself. If she doesn’t show her face now, Yaz will give it all away in a few seconds just by saying Rose’s name.
So she turns her head, pushing her hair out of her face, and looks the Doctor in the eye.
The reaction is immediate. Rose only gets a brief glimpse of the Doctor’s mild curiosity before she stumbles back, her expression shifting to open-mouthed shock. Rose stares back, trying to find something familiar in this new Doctor’s eyes— but the world seems far away all of a sudden, and she’s too dizzy to stand, and she slides down the wall as her vision goes fuzzy— the last thing she hears before she passes out is the Doctor saying, “You shouldn’t be here.”
She comes to what must be only a minute or two later, given that she’s being carried through the air, arms under her knees and bracing her back, each arm slung across a shoulder, her head lolled forward. She lifts her head, opening her eyes to see the Doctor and Yaz maneuvering her through the TARDIS doors— and—
It’s different. For a moment, that’s all Rose can think about. The TARDIS is different. It’s not the dingy copper she remembers; it’s all dark blue and shiny chrome and glowing crystals. Any trace of familiarity is gone.
Another thing Rose has lost, then.
It would bring her to tears, but she thinks she might be empty now. Not just of tears, but of everything— strength, will, emotion. She’s done with all of it.
“You all right?” Yaz asks. Rose turns her head to see Yaz looking at her with equal parts curiosity and concern.
“Fine,” Rose says. “I— I haven’t been feeling my best.” It’s an understatement, of course. And she’ll have to give the full story later, but for now she just lets the Doctor and Yaz carry her through the TARDIS corridors in silence until they reach the medbay. It’s changed, too, to match the new TARDIS, the walls the same dark chrome as the rest of the place. But as the Doctor and Yaz ease Rose down onto the bed, she gets a sudden sense of deja vu, a friendly feeling of home. It’s distant, difficult for Rose to reach through all her grief and exhaustion, but it’s there, like the sun on a cold winter’s day, barely kissing her skin.
The Doctor and Yaz step back, and Rose reaches over to where she knows she’ll find a remote control. She picks it up and pushes a button, and half the bed tilts, pushing her up to a sitting position. She leans against the pillow, looking up at the Doctor and Yaz, who are still staring at her, looking concerned.
“I’m okay,” she says.
They’re still staring.
“Really,” Rose insists. “I’m fine. I’ve just— I should’ve brought my chair with me, is all.”
“How’d you even get here?” the Doctor asks. “I thought you were in Pete’s World. With—” She glances at Yaz. “I mean, with your family.”
“Yeah, well, I came back.” Rose doesn’t mean to sound so combative. It’s just that this is exactly why she didn’t want to seek out the Doctor— the Doctor’s moved on. She’s got new friends, new problems. And Rose is still drowning in her grief over her family, over someone who’s sort of the Doctor but very much not, and having the real Doctor here, a little detached from it all, while she processes everything— it’s not ideal.
The Doctor glances at the dimension cannon on Rose’s chest. “No chance you did all that without poking a hole in the universe.”
Irritation flares in Rose’s chest, muted by her exhaustion but present nonetheless. “Seeing as the alternative was dying , yeah, I poked a little hole. Barely big enough for me to go through, so, you’re welcome.”
The Doctor tilted her head to the side, her brow furrowed. “What do you mean, dying?”
“I’m going to go find some food,” Yaz says loudly. She strides out of the room, the door closing behind her. The Doctor spares her a glance before turning her gaze back to Rose.
“Dying?” she asks again, an air of mild politeness in her voice.
Rose leans back, closing her eyes. It’s hard enough to talk about as it is— she doesn’t need to add this new Doctor’s impassively curious face to it all. “Being in the other universe was making me sick.” The words hang in the air in front of her. “We think it’s because of Bad Wolf. We ran some tests— apparently I need vortex energy from this universe to survive.”
“Oh!” the Doctor exclaims, loudly enough that it startles Rose into opening her eyes. The Doctor’s mouth is open again, full of the relief that comes with understanding. “I should’ve known that might happen.”
Rose stares.
“You absorbed the whole time vortex,” the Doctor adds. “I considered all sorts of scenarios with that clone of mine dying, but I didn’t think—”
“So this could’ve been prevented.” Rose’s voice is flat. “I could still be with him if you’d thought to consider what might’ve happened to me.”
The Doctor rocks back on her heels, her mouth pressed into a line. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d be happy together.”
“We were.” Rose can’t help the bitterness in her tone. She hadn’t thought much about what would happen if she saw the Doctor again, and now she’s surprised to be angry. But of course she’s angry. She was supposed to have a spectacular human life with John, and instead she got a few measly years, filled with pain and fatigue, dizziness and doctor’s appointments. And all of it could have been avoided if the Doctor had just— done something differently.
“You didn’t even ask us,” she adds, defeated. “I jumped through so many universes just to find you, and you barely even talked to me. You just shoved us off to Bad Wolf Bay, not even a thought for what would happen if everything went wrong. Never mind what happens to us, because now you’ve got your clone and your clingy ex out of the way. Everything tied up in a nice little bow.”
Tears are rolling down her face now. She’s gaining steam, gearing up for a proper rant. “Never mind that we only had three years together. Never mind that three years is long enough to fall completely, totally in love with somebody.”
She fiddles with her wedding ring, running her finger across the thin metal. She can’t quite bring herself to make eye contact with the Doctor. She’s speaking into the air instead, building a picture of her grief. “I was attached to John. Not just as a clone of you, Doctor. As himself. A whole and separate human who I was meant to spend the rest of my life with.” She does look at the Doctor now, holding the gaze of those unfamiliar eyes. “I know our human lives look like nothing to you, Doctor. I know that even if I live a hundred years, it’ll only be a fraction of what you’ve experienced. But I’m still a person. And so is John. And you owed it to us to let us decide what to do with our lives, and even if you weren’t going to do that, you owed it to me and to him to at least think about it for more than two minutes before making my choice for me!”
Rose takes a deep breath. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, trying to preserve some kind of dignity, before looking back at the Doctor. The Doctor is giving her an infuriatingly neutral expression— it’s sympathetic, sure, but the kind of sympathy Rose would expect to see for a stranger going through something difficult, not someone you once had a deep connection to and then sent to a parallel universe.
For a moment, Rose doesn’t think the Doctor will respond, but then she dips her head and says, “Your life was never nothing to me. You know that.”
Rose shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she says, turning away from the Doctor. “Whatever you say. It won’t bring him here.”
“No,” the Doctor’s voice says quietly. “It won’t.”
Tears are falling down Rose’s face again. She’s more than tired of all this crying, but there’s not much else she can do at this point. She hasn’t felt well in years now, she’s just had to leave everyone she loved for even the hope of maybe feeling better eventually, and now she’s back on the TARDIS and everything is unfamiliar and this brand new Doctor is looking at her with placid sympathy.
“I didn’t mean to be here,” she says. “I was going to go find Jack. Make a life for myself on Earth.”
“On your own?” the Doctor asks quietly, and a knife twists in Rose’s heart as she recognizes her own words echoed back to her.
“If I had to.” Rose falls quiet for a long moment. And then she adds, “It’s just bad luck I showed up next to the TARDIS, I suppose. Or fate, maybe.”
“Could be something else.” The sympathy has gone out of the Doctor’s tone— it’s conversational now. Rose can’t quite figure this Doctor out.
She sits up, looking at the Doctor. “What?”
“You said looking into the time vortex affected you,” the Doctor offers. “Time vortex, TARDIS. You. Suppose ‘fate’ is as good a word as any.” She scrunches her face. “Or, you know. A complicated combination of factors that on the surface might look like fate.” She raises her eyebrows. “Can the TARDIS run some tests?”
Rose sighs. She’s already had test after test run on her. A few more can’t hurt.
“Sure,” she says.
The Doctor approaches her, still with that same strange detachment. There’s a rack of equipment next to the bed, and the Doctor picks up a mass of electrodes and cables.
“Can I touch?” she asks, one hand hovering over Rose’s neck.
Rose nods, moving her hair to the side. Businesslike, barely making eye contact, the Doctor presses an electrode to Rose’s neck, one to the side of her head, one to the top of her chest. She doesn’t let her hand linger a moment longer than necessary. She connects the other end of the cables to a port in the wall of the TARDIS, and a screen blinks on, covered in a familiar circular script. Rose can’t actually read it, so she lies on her back and waits for the Doctor, now sitting on a stool next to her bed, staring at the screen, to tell her what’s going on. She hates this, she realizes— with John, even when he was a step ahead of her, she always knew what was going on. She could read the results, and if there was anything she didn’t get right away, he’d help her understand. And she could do the same for him, when something came up that he wasn’t familiar with. They’d been on an even playing field.
She doesn’t feel that way with this Doctor, somehow. This Doctor has a face like a brick wall, and her eyes skate from Rose to the screen in front of her without a hint of what she might be seeing. Rose stares up at the ceiling, watching the lights shift from blue to violet to red. This version of the TARDIS is a lot more dynamic than the one Rose knows— it’s a little disorienting. It just adds to the feeling that nothing is the same.
The second she thinks it, the lights turn a warm amber and stay that way. Rose blinks. It must be a coincidence— but… just to test it out, Rose closes her eyes and imagines a greenish blue. When she looks again, the ceiling lights have turned that color. She turns her imagination to red, and suddenly she’s bathed in red, looking fresh out of a nightmare sequence. She blinks, and the lights return to that warm amber, like a firelit room. Rose turns her head to look at the Doctor, who’s completely focused on her screen.
“When you say my coming to the TARDIS could’ve been fate,” she ventures, “d’you mean I could be connected to the TARDIS somehow?”
The Doctor springs to her feet with an energy Rose envies.
“That’s exactly what I think,” she says. “There’s something going on with you, Rose Tyler, and we are going to get to the bottom of it.”
Rose winces to hear her name. “It’s Tyler-Noble now,” she says.
The Doctor freezes, her head tilted to one side, her face scrunched up in confusion. “You married parallel Donna?”
Rose stares. “What? No. John called himself Noble.”
“Really?” The Doctor looks more surprised than she has any right to be, considering. “I would’ve gone with Smith.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t you,” Rose says, trying not to snap. “He was half Donna, remember?”
The Doctor presses her mouth into a line and nods, a detached, jerky motion. She glances back at the screen by the bed and says, “It looks like you’ve got more vortex energy than the average human. Artron energy and huon particles, too.”
“Yeah,” Rose says. “We figured that out. Easy enough.” Her skin is crawling now. She’s tired of talking to the Doctor, tired of the electrodes, itchy on her chest, tired from such a long, emotional day. She just wants to get up and run out of the room, but she’s sure if she tried she’d wind up collapsing before she even got to the door. “Anything else?”
The Doctor frowns at the screen. “I’m not sure you’re entirely human anymore.”
If Rose had heard that even a year ago, it would’ve been earth-shattering. But knowing what she knows now— “All right, then.”
“Definitely connected to the TARDIS,” the Doctor continues. “In fact, I think she made you more like her. Running on the same energy and all.”
“John told me—” Rose’s breath catches. “He told me the TARDIS was trying to protect me.”
The Doctor nods, still looking at the screen. “Sounds right,” she says. She’s living up to her name, at this point— her brisk tone and quick explanations make her sound just like a human doctor. She glances at Rose. “You did the right thing, coming back here. Could’ve died if you’d stayed.”
Rose doesn’t answer. She’s tired of thinking about it.
“Don’t be surprised if you start feeling time,” the Doctor adds.
Rose keeps her silence. There’s very little that could surprise her at this point. She’s too exhausted, really, to be surprised.
The Doctor hovers for another moment, rocking back and forth, her hands in her pockets, her mouth pressed into a line again. Finally, she says, “All right, then. I’ll let you get your rest.” She hesitates. “I promised Yaz we’d go visit her family in Sheffield tomorrow. You’re welcome to come with us. Explore a bit, and all that.” She pauses again and adds, “You’ve still got a room around here somewhere, too, if you get tired of the medbay.”
“Is there, um—” There’s something about asking for help that feels so… pathetic, somehow. But there’s only a fifty percent chance that Rose will be able to make it to her room on her own. “I’ve been using a wheelchair. In the parallel universe.”
“Oh! The TARDIS can sort you out.” The Doctor opens a door on one end of the room and disappears. She returns a few seconds later pushing a shining silver chair with bright red cushions— it looks like something out of a 1950’s diner. “Got this from Disneyland Mars in the 37th century. But if anyone asks, it wasn’t me.” She gestures at the seat. “It’s made of this highly adaptive material. Shapes itself to your body. Brilliant, honestly.”
Rose sees a little more of the old Doctor in this Doctor’s grin, in her excitement over a particularly useful bit of technology— but it melts away the second the Doctor looks back at Rose and her face settles back into its serious and distant expression.
“Right, then. Anything else you need?”
“Don’t think so.” Nothing the Doctor can give her, anyway, unless she can make Rose fully human again and send her back to the parallel universe.
The Doctor nods one more time. “Right, then. I’ll come find you before we leave for Sheffield.”
“Thanks.” Rose lies back, closing her eyes. She hears the Doctor’s footsteps recede. For a second, she considers going off to find her room, but her eyes are refusing to open, and before she can make any decisions, she drifts off to sleep.