Sunset

by Mad Maudlin (LJ | e-mail | comment)

Art by blackbearblue (LJ | e-mail | comment) and Medley (LJ | e-mail | comment)

ACT 5 Home Is Where

"Home," he mocked gently.

"Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he's nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."

"I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve."

Chapter 18

First things first, she called British Airways. "I need a flight to Mexico City, immediately."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm afraid all our seats on the next such flight are booked--"

"This is Torchwood agent 65930, authorization ninety-nine," Rose said. "Can you get me a seat or not?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "I think something can be arranged, ma'am. Your name?"

Then she called her parents from the car (which she'd borrowed from a Dover PC), leaving a voice mail in the middle of the night. "Mum, Dad, listen-I'm going to Mexico City, it's the Doctor, I'm sorry, he's in hospital and I need to find out what's going on. I'll call you when I get there."

The last person she called was Mr. Winslow. She meant to leave him a voice mail, too, but he woke up on the second ring. "Prentice? Is that you?"

"Yes, sir," she said. "I'm leaving Dover now, sir. There's a...a family emergency, and I need to take some of the vacation I've got saved up."

"Of course," Winslow said. "Of course, I understand completely-it's not your uncle, is it?"

For a minute Rose forgot who he was talking about. "No, sir, Mr. Tyler's just fine. It's...complicated. I'll let you know later how long I'll be."

"Of course, Ms. Prentice," he said. "My prayers are with you."

"Thank you, sir," Rose said, and ended the call before she could get too soppy about it.

Dawn was breaking by the time she'd got to the airport, got her tickets from a clerk who was helpful bordering on obsequious, and got aboard the airship. One thing she was learning to love about this world's blimps over planes-you could use your mobile during the flight. After she'd stowed her bag, she collapsed in the seat and decided it was safe to call Jake and Grace personally about this one.

Jake answered on the first ring. "Rose? What the hell's going on?" he asked, though he sounded more worried than actually angry. "I thought we agreed, no more running off?"

"Is Grace with you?" Rose asked, looking out the window at the sparkling lights of Heathrow. "I don't want to explain this twice."

There was some background noise and beeping, and then Grace said, "I'm here, what's the problem?" in tinny, echoing tones. Jake must've put on the speakerphone.

"The Doctor-Dr. Noble, I mean-is in hospital in Mexico City," she said. "He's in serious condition, but I haven't gotten any more information on him. I'm listed as his next of kin in all his papers, so I need to leave for a while-I'm already on the blimp."

Jake swore faintly, somewhere. Grace asked, "Do you know what happened to him?"

"No," Rose said. "I just, I need to go. I'll phone you when I know more. I'm sorry to leave you like this, but--"

"Go," Jake said. "Go on. You do what you need to, we'll hold it down from here."

She couldn't tell if he was angry again or not. "I don't know how long I'll be," she said.

"Long as you need to be," Jake said. "Just call and let us know he's not dead, okay? He's a git but I don't wish him dead."

Rose exhaled. "Thanks, I think. I'll let you know-yeah, you know."

"We'll be in touch," Grace promised. "And if you know what hospital he's in, I can try to get his chart emailed to me, to get more information."

"That would be brilliant," Rose sighed. "It's Central Municipal Hospital in Mexico City."

And then, as the lights of London dwindled below her, she tried calling the hospital back for her own update. Unfortunately, by then it was the middle of the night in Mexico City, and she couldn't even get a receptionist that spoke English, and her grasp of Spanish began and ended with si.

The little screen in the arm of her seat informed her it was a thirteen-hour flight. There wasn't much to do but slip on her little eyeshade and give in to sleep.

Despite the uncomfortable chair and the teenagers kicking the back of it, Rose did manage to get a few good hours of sleep in; when she gave up on getting any more they were still over the Atlantic and a flight attendant was bringing around boxed lunches. Rose ate, walked up and down the aisle a bit to stretch her legs, and then checked her phone for messages or missed calls, even though they were in a dead zone with no signal. There was a single email from Pete with a full dossier on the Doctor, or rather, his cover story-including things like his passport number and insurance information, thank goodness. Rose hadn't even thought to ask for that. She composed a quick thanks, even if she couldn't send it yet, and then settled down to read the dossier. It wouldn't do for her to mix up any details of his cover story when she was meant to be his next of kin, after all.

John Noble, human being. Born in Kent, April 23, 1971, no siblings, both parents deceased-not too unusual these days. Two degrees in physics from Oxford, very nice. Previous jobs in engineering firms and research laboratories, still technically employed by the UN despite faffing off with no warning and no forwarding address, so that Rose had to illegally stalk his credit cards, and then turning up in bloody Mexico with his head caved in or his elbows broken or that one fragile heart pierced by a bullet and Rose had to run and save him, or just run to him, and maybe even watch him die--

She put down her phone and tried to breathe deeply.

It was just her luck that she'd finally started to-not forget him, exactly, because she'd never be able to do that. Get beyond him, maybe. Discover what her life could be like when she wasn't chasing after him, or the ghost of what she wanted him to be. And now he'd gone and dragged her back in again, maybe for the last time. It had begun to feel like they were always saying goodbye, one way or another, and she wasn't sure how much more of that she could bear.

She checked the time in Mexico City and realized it was finally a reasonable hour; thirty minutes more and she had a signal again. She called the hospital again, and just kept asking Hablos Anglais? until she found somebody who did. "I'm calling about a patient, an Englishman, named John Noble..."

"Oh, our big hero!" the voice on the other end said. "He is in serious condition, very serious, but stable now."

"What the hell happened to him?" she demanded.

"You didn't hear?" the voice asked. "A burning building fell on him. He saved like twelve kids!"

A burning building fell on him. Of course. Didn't that sort of thing happen to everyone? "So he's in serious condition," she said. "What's that mean? Is he conscious?"

"He...uh...I will find you the surgeon, okay?" the voice said, and before Rose could protest, they put her on hold. Stable now, okay, that was a relief. He was stable. Stable and maybe in a coma or something awful, but stable. For now. She hung up on the hospital and started paging through the in-flight magazine, but didn't managed to read a single word.

When they finally arrived, Rose had to use her Torchwood ID to get through customs since she hadn't brought her passport; it took a stupidly long amount of time to get everything sorted (and send a quick message to Jake asking him or Grace to find her passport and mail it to her). It was early afternoon in Mexico City, and Rose was sweltering in her jacket and sweater as soon as she stepped out of the climate-controlled airport. She grabbed a taxi to the hospital (the first one she could find that spoke English) and on the way used her phone to look up Fun and Functional Spanish Phrases-god, why couldn't a building have fallen on the Doctor in Quebec or something? Rose could at least muddle about in French, instead of having to rely on everyone else to know English.

By the time she got to the hospital admissions desk, she had composed a little speech and reeled it off. Either she was surprisingly clear or completely incomprehensible, but the nurse made a call and pointed her to a chair. A few minutes later, a young man in green scrubs came in and looked around. "Rose Tyler Prentice?" he asked, in an accent that sounded more American than anything else.

"Yeah, that's me," she said. "I'm here about Dr. Noble."

He smiled at her. "My name's Eduardo Ramirez, you can call me Eddie. I'm John's nurse and I can take you up to see him."

"What's his condition?" she asked as Eddie lead the way through the hospital corridors.

"Same as it has been for everybody calling about him-serious and stable," Eddie said. "The surgeon, Dr. Vasquez, she can explain--"

"I don't want to talk to the surgeon," Rose said firmly. "Everyone keeps trying to kick me over to the surgeon. I want answers now."

"Okay, okay, I get that," Eddie said. "So there was this fire downtown-nice apartments, not those shacks on the lakefront they threw up during the war, nobody knows what happened-anyway, the firefighters weren't there yet, so John went running into to help evacuate everybody."

Rose snorted, and Eddie raised an eyebrow at him. "No, sorry, just-that's just like him, running towards the burning building when normal people are running away."

"Well, everyone here thinks it's pretty special," Eddie said. "I mean, not just a regular guy, but a tourist, even, and he saved these two little kids-got his picture in the papers about it, too. But when he went back inside he got pinned by some debris, and he was unconscious when the firemen brought him out."

"Is he awake now?"

Eddie shook his head. "We put a tube in his throat to help him breathe, and that's pretty uncomfortable, so Dr. Vasquez had him sedated. He's gonna need surgery for a pretty nasty break in one thighbone and he's got some bad burns, too, but his vitals are all okay and there's no sign of an infection or internal bleeding."

Rose exhaled. "Thank you. I mean it, I've been trying to get a straight answer out of somebody for hours and hours and-thanks."

"Don't mention it," Eddie said. "Probably they don't know all the technical terms in English. Me, my mom's a citizen of California, I grew up on both sides of the border and went to nursing school in Los Angeles, so I can talk shop both ways."

"I read French in school," Rose said miserably. "So if you need to order a cheese omelet, I'm your woman."

They exited an elevator into the silence of the intensive care ward, and Eddie made a few quick comments to another nurse before taking Rose to a particular room. "He's looking kinda scary right now," he said softly. "Don't let it upset you, okay?"

"I've seen worse things, trust me," Rose told him.

But the Doctor in intensive care, even by her standards, was pretty bad. He was still as the grave, and the tape that held the breathing tube in place seemed to cover half his face. One arm was packed in the same gelatinous bandages that Jake had been treated with, only there were more of them, and his bare right leg was in traction, skinny and pale where it wasn't red and blistered. A heart monitor beeped out the slow, steady rhythm of a single heart, and the pump attached to the tube whispered every few minutes with an artificial exhale.

Eddie pushed a chair in her direction, a boxy little armchair with some faint stains in the upholstery. Rose sat in it. "There's some paperwork for you to do, but that can wait a little while more. I'm gonna go find Dr. Vasquez for you. She'll be able to give you the full report, okay?"

Rose nodded, because now that she was here she didn't mind so much waiting on the mysterious Dr. Vasquez. "Thanks again," she said.

"Hey, I'm a nurse, this is part of what I do," he said as he walked out the door.

She couldn't seem to tear her eyes away from the bed. He looked frail, there, with the tubes down his throat and the tubes and wires curling around him; frail, fragile, mortal. No larger than life or death. "You stupid bastard," she said, without any feeling in it, because he'd been saving children from a fire, how stupid was that? "Idiot," she added anyway, just because it always wound him up, and if there was any chance he could hear her under all the drugs she wanted him to know she was there. "I've come all this way for you, are you happy? Or were you trying to keep away from me?" Tears pricked her eyes, and she had to sniffle a little in spite of herself. "Why am I even talking to you when you're unconscious, anyway?"

Her phone rang, making her jump. Grace Holloway calling. "Grace, hello, sorry," Rose answered. "I just got to the hospital."

"That's about what I figured," Grace said. "While you were in transit, I managed to get through to the hospital and convince them that John's still a Torchwood employee so they'd talk to me about him. How's he look?"

"Bad," Rose admitted.

"Well, he's not gonna walk it off, that's for sure," she said. "Is he still intubated?"

"Yeah..."

"Probably just a precaution," Grace assured her. "There's always a chance for airway injury with smoke inhalation. But I'm looking at his preliminary results and I pretty much agree with the local doctor's diagnosis."

"Which is?" Rose asked. "I haven't seen her yet."

"Right, sorry," Grace said. "He'll need surgery to put his femur back together, and most likely a skin graft to cover some of those burns-I don't know how you end up with burns like that on your front, incidentally, because normal people would bend forward when fiery debris is falling around them."

"This is the Doctor, remember," Rose said.

Grace snorted. "Right, my bad. Anyway, it's going to be a couple weeks before he's up and moving around, and probably a couple of months of physical therapy-and it'll be way worse than what Jake's whining about, at least in the beginning-but unless he suddenly comes up with a airway injury or a massive infection, I think he's out of the woods at this point."

Rose let out her breath, the breath she felt she'd been holding since she got the phone call in Dover. "Thanks, Grace," she said. "Anybody gone after my passport yet?"

"Jake has the spare key, so I made him do it," she said. "He also said something about stealing your perishable foods, if this turns out to be like the last time you ran off on us."

Rose winced. "I don't know. It...it's gonna depend on what the Doctor wants to do when he wakes up."

"Well, if you come home and the cupboards are bare, you know who to beat up," Grace said. "What time is it there, anyway? Two? Three?"

"I...have no idea." There'd been a big clock in the customs office but she'd been so focused on getting out she hadn't noticed it.

"Did you sleep at all on the flight?"

"Little bit," Rose admitted.

"Well, don't run yourself ragged, okay?" Grace made a noise that was not quite a yawn. "Sorry. Long day. I'm still in Dover, with Tosh, cleaning up the loose ends before we foist all this off on the UN."

"You get some rest to," Rose said. "We did good yesterday."

"Hell yeah, we did."

Rose hung up and leaned back in the chair to watch the Doctor, watch his chest rise and fall as the machine breathed for him. He was going to be all right, though. Eventually. And for the moment, he needed her just as much as she'd once needed him.

She didn't even notice she was tired before she fell asleep.

Rose woke to someone gently shaking her shoulder and murmuring in Spanish. "Sorry, erm, I don't," she started to protest, but the realized the woman nudging her was wearing a blue smock and carrying a push mop. She waved it gently, in case Rose didn't notice it the first time. "Yeah, got it, I'll just...I'll just step outside."

She took one last look at the Doctor-still sleeping, still frail-and then got out of the janitor's way. There was no sign of Nurse Eddie or the paperwork that he was meant to be bringing her, and she had to walk around the ward a bit to even find a clock. Seven o'clock local time, which meant it was one AM in Britain. God, she hated blimp lag.

Though she hated to leave the Doctor for long, her stomach was rumbling-she'd last eaten during her flight. So she carefully studied all the signs in the halls until she found her way to a small public cafeteria, where there was hot coffee and semi-familiar food. She got a second coffee and carried it back upstairs with her, just in time to find a woman in scrubs coming out of the Doctor's room. She was tall and thin, with a wedge of graying hair and plenty of laugh lines, and she was giving instructions to a female nurse as Rose approached. "Excuse me," she said, fully aware that she was interrupting. "Are you Dr. Vasquez?"

She smiled. "Yes, yes-Gabriella Vazquez. You are Miss Prentice? Eddie told me about you."

Her English wasn't quiet as fluent as Eddie's, her accent a little more marked, but Rose was finally started to appreciate the skill of a second language. "What's going on now?" she asked. "Has anything changed?"

"No, no-we removed the tube, is all, because there is no airway injury." Vasquez said quickly. "Your husband is improving well."

Rose didn't flinch, but it was a near thing. "He's not my husband," she said. "We're just...we're together, but not married."

"Oh!" Vasquez covered her mouth for a moment. "So sorry, I-I assumed--"

"It's all right," Rose said. After all, she'd been assuming an awful lot until recently, too.

They finally brought her all that paperwork to do, but of course it was all Spanish, so another nurse had to help with most of it. There were some things, like payment information, that would have to wait until the Doctor was able to sign off, but Rose muddled through the worst of it, and when she was done Vasquez came back. "We've lowered his medication, but we don't know when he'll wake up," she said. "There's a good hotel not far from here-I can have someone book you a room, if you like."

"Can I wait here?" Rose asked. "I don't want him to wake up alone."

Vasquez smiled again. "Of course. I will tell the night staff not to bother you."

Grace would never forgive her-much less her back-but Rose settled back in the same old chair again to wait. She sort of wished she'd had time to grab a book or something during the flight-maybe a crossword puzzle, something. She fiddled with her phone some more, but at this hour she couldn't justify sending anything but email messages-I'm here, I'm okay, the Doctor will live-and then playing the stupid little mini mobile games that she'd never bothered playing before. It turned out she was really, really bad at Sudoku.

Just when she was starting to think that maybe that hotel would've been a good idea, the Doctor made a small noise and tried to turn his head. Though they'd taken the tube out-there were still red patches where they'd pulled the tape away-they'd put one of those little oxygen tubes under his nose, and it started to pull when he moved. A small line appeared between his eyebrows, and he tried to turn his head the other way.

"Don't," Rose told him, and leaned forward to take his uninjured hand. "You'll knock something out of place and I don't know how to call for a nurse in Spanish."

But that just made him turn the other way again, towards her, and eventually he dragged his eyes open. "Rose," he sighed, and smiled, and looked at her like she was wonderful. At least for a moment. Then he seemed to remember they weren't speaking to each other and his expression clouded over. "Er. Hello."

"Hello yourself," she said. "How do you feel?"

"I think," he said slowly, voice raspy from the tube, "that I am on some very interesting medication." He raised his head slightly to get a good look at his lower body. "Oh my."

"Look on the bright side," Rose said. "You've got your picture in the paper for it."

He let his head fall back and shut his eyes, for long enough that Rose thought he'd fallen asleep again. Then he sighed and said, "You found me."

"I didn't know I was supposed to be looking," she said. She wanted to point out that she'd not only found him, she'd come to him, waited for him, and that was more than he'd done for her. But his grimace either indicated he knew that already or he was in quite a lot of pain, and either way she decided it wasn't worth scoring the petty points. "The hospital called me. Said I was your emergency contact with your hotel and with the embassy."

"Yeah," he said. "Didn't know who else to put, so..." He tried to shrug with his bandaged arm and winced.

"Well, thank you for that," Rose said. "Otherwise I might never have known you'd gotten yourself killed."

"Wait, am I dead?" he asked. "I didn't think it would hurt this much."

"You nearly were," she said. "You've got a broken legs and some ridiculous percentage of burned body area and, oh yeah, a building fell on you."

"Only parts of it," he muttered.

Rose sighed, because she was too tired and her sleep cycle was too addled to maintain real anger. "It's like you keep forgetting you can't regenerate anymore."

"This had nothing to do with regenerating," he said, surprisingly sharp in spite of the drugs. "People needed help and it was the right thing to do."

"So you don't care you could've been killed?" she asked.

He sighed and tried to turn away from her. "Well, it wasn't like I'd have left anyone behind."

Tears picked at corners of Rose's eyes. And here she thought she was done crying over this man. "Idiot," she snapped, to get his attention. "Stupid, selfish bastard."

He shut his eyes again. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. For everything."

"You're about three weeks late on that one," she informed him.

He flinched. "I didn't think you wanted me around anymore," he said meekly. "Not after...not after I failed you like that. I failed everybody."

"Idiot," she said again. "We all made mistakes that night. Not all of us got to run away from them."

He shut his eyes and said again, "Sorry. I can't...I can't think clearly anymore." He paused. "Or, well, not as clearly as I used to...things get muddled. I'm muddled. I'm not used to muddling. I'm so sorry."

"We've both been a bit muddled," Rose admitted with a sigh. "Probably still are."

"Does that mean you forgive me?" he asked, opening one eye a sliver in a ridiculously boyish look.

"I'm working on that," Rose said, and watched his face fall. She steeled herself to carry on. "I need to know, soon, what you want to do. If you want to stay here in Mexico for treatment or go...somewhere else."

He didn't miss her hesitation. "Where else would I go?" he asked.

Rose shrugged. "Cardiff. London. Anywhere but here." She didn't mean to use the same phrase from the note he'd left her, but she didn't try to take it back, either, even when he made a miserable face. "You're a hero, you know. They say you were in the papers and everything."

"Lovely," he said dully. "Do you want me to go back to Cardiff?"

"I don't see how that has to do with anything," she said, folding her arms.

"Well," he said, "before I take the trouble to get transferred there in my delicate condition, I'd like to know if anybody's waiting for me there. If I'm welcome."

He had dark shadows under his eyes and small blisters on his face, and he watched her with dark and desperate eyes. "It still depends," Rose said slowly, forcing herself to meet his gaze, "on where it is you want to be."

He nodded like he understood, looking ten times more exhausted all of a sudden. "Take me home, Rose," he said softly. "Wherever that is. Please."

"All right," she said, and took his hand. "I'll just talk to the doctors and find out when you can leave." But she didn't go talk to anyone; she stayed where she was, holding his hand, until he feel asleep again.

Rose ended up staying in Mexico City for two more days. Most of the time she was in the hospital, just staying by the Doctor's side, listening to anything he might be too sleepy or drugged to follow. Vasqeuz talked to Grace twice before agreeing to do the surgery on the Doctor's thigh in Mexico but the skin graft in Cardiff. "We have to put pins, you see? Here, here, and here. Steel pins, so the pieces stay together and heal strong."

The Doctor seemed more fascinated by the jagged break on the x-ray film than what Vasquez was saying, so Rose asked, "How soon until he can walk on it, then?"

"That will depend more on the skin graft," Vasquez said. "He will be on bed rest for some weeks after that, so the graft will heal correctly. Dr. Holloway will decide whether to put a cast on the thigh, and when, but after that he should be able to walk with a, oh, what's it called, cane? Crunch?"

"Crutch," Rose supplied.

"Sounds like I'm going to get plenty of rest," the Doctor said glumly.

"At least I'll know where you are," Rose shot back.

When she wasn't at the hospital, she had to go to the British Embassy to pick up her passport, and then to the Doctor's hotel to gather his things. It was a little grim, packing up his toothbrush and pajamas for him, a little too much like he had died, and she tried not to look too closely at the familiar shirts and trousers and ties as she stuffed it into a suitcase and toted it back to her own hotel. There was also a side trip to a shopping mall, necessary because even for two days, Mexico City in October was more like Britain in July, and she needed a change of clothes that wouldn't make her sweat to death when she wasn't in an air-conditioned room.

Pete was willing to help make the arrangements, when she did managed to catch him at a reasonable hour. "He's still technically my employee, remember," he said. "I can arrange a private airship for the two of you, direct to Cardiff."

"What about a hospital?" Rose asked. "Grace has staff privileges at UHW."

"And she's already lined up a burn specialist there to admit him when he arrives," Pete said. "We've been in touch."

For a moment it was a little surreal, thinking of Pete and Grace speaking to each other-like something in Rose's world had twisted around on itself to let two separate pieces touch. "Thanks," she said. "Sorry. I'm a little stressed out here."

"That's perfectly understandable," Pete said. "Have you decided what you're doing next when you get back?"

"What do you mean, what am I doing next?" she asked.

"About the Doctor," he said.

Rose sighed. "No. I haven't decided anything."

"Not something you should leave to the last minute."

His surgery was on Wednesday, and Rose watched him chat with Vasquez and the orthopedic surgeon, a small round man with a perfectly hairless head. The Doctor, it seemed, spoke fluent Spanish-some leftover echo of his life as a Time Lord, and which Rose found patently unfair. They gave him the first round of anesthetics and then left so Rose could have a word before the drugs kicked in. "We'll leave first thing in the morning," she reminded him. "The hospital will provide an ambulance to the airport for you."

"Will you be there?" he asked. "In the ambulance, I mean."

Rose hesitated. "Sure," she said, wondering if it was the right decision. "I'll ask if I can bring our luggage."

"Good," the Doctor said. His eyes were already looking a bit glassy. "Tired of traveling alone. 'S boring. Kept wishing you were with me."

Rose's throat started to feel a bit tight again. "Well, now I am," she said, for lack of anything else.

"Yeah." His mouth stretched into a slow, sleepy smile. "Missed you. Haven't told you that yet, I don't think."

"You hadn't," Rose said.

"I did." He yawned. "And I think I'm on a lot of drugs now, aren't I?"

"Just a few.

He shut his eyes and leaned back in the pillows. "Doesn't make it not true. In chemo, veritas, as they say."

"Who's ever said that?" Rose asked.

"Well, there's me....and...no, wait, that was me again..." He put his good finger to his lips as if thinking. "I think...no, he was quoting me..."

And Rose laughed, for the first time in what felt like forever. "You're impossible."

"Not really," he said, smiling at her. "Just highly improbable."

On impulse, Rose bent down and kissed his temple. He gaped at her, mouth moving soundlessly, like a fish, which made her blush terribly. "I'll try to be here when you wake up, okay?" she said. "But I've got some thing to get done before we leave."

"Okay," he said, blinking. The drugs were probably starting to kick in. Rose sort of wished she had that excuse.

She found Nurse Eddie and pulled him away from his other patients to help her finalize the ambulance arrangements, and then she ate lunch, and then wandered. She'd been so busy getting things under control, taking care of everything that needed managing, that she'd barely had time to appreciate that she was in one of the most beautiful cities of the post-war boom. She found herself on the waterfront, overlooking the artificial lake that had made the city an island again after however many centuries; it had been a crucial defense during the Cyberwar, and there was already a bronze statue of a man with binoculars in the middle of the stony beach to commemorate the failed siege. Children played there without much fuss, throwing rocks at each other or running up to the edge of the wind-whipped water and then retreating from the little waves with shrieks and cries. Rose found a bench a little further on, standing alone on the strand with nothing around it but rocks and mud; maybe there'd been a bus shelter here once, or a park, and only this remained.

She looked out over the water and wondered what had possessed her to kiss the Doctor back there, why he'd looked so shocked. She'd been honest when she said she still hadn't completely forgiven him for running away, no matter how often he apologized. She still wasn't objective around him, just like Pete had warned her, and she needed some time to get back on her feet after the wringer she'd just been through. She needed some time to clear her head. She needed some time to decided, like Grace had asked, what she was really chasing after.

She didn't need the Doctor anymore, and she'd proven that.

But, the more she thought about his silly smile, the more she realized a part of her still wanted him.

Did that even make a difference?

"You don't know what you want," she said to herself softly. "You barely even know him, really." And she couldn't let herself get distracted by how much he said he loved her. He'd said he loved her and he still walked away. She had to be objective about this. And there were still so many things to sort out, like their baggage and the surgery and the flight back home...maybe they could talk it out, though, talk things over. On the flight, if he was awake enough. After he'd gotten settled in Cardiff, certainly.

Somehow, it was always later when it came to him.

She walked back to the avenue, withdrew some more pesos from the first cashpoint she could find, and then hailed a taxi. She had to hit up her hotel and arrange an early check-out before she went back to the hospital, and she didn't want the Doctor to wake up alone. That wasn't loss of objectivity, that was kindness; she just had to be careful that that was all it was.

Apparently having pins surgically inserted into a bone was more painful than Rose could've imagined, because the Doctor was on the really, really good drugs. He slept through the ambulance ride and drifted in and out during the whole long flight. Rose was glad she'd found some English-language newspapers in the airport to keep her occupied, even if they were all from America. The front page of the New York Times was the head of the American branch of All Earth denying involvement with the British branch of the party or any sort of smuggling operation. There was more about Lawrence Hadley's arrest in the international pages. Mr. Hadley had no official comment, but a spokesman for his family said they are "saddened by this turn of events" and "confident that Lawrence's name will be cleared." The Office of Homeworld Security refused to comment on speculation that Hadley's personal assistant, Arthur Dale, had agreed to testify against his former boss in exchange for a reduced sentence. Dale was arrested on October 11th in the port city of Dover by agents of the British Torchwood Institute after a three-month investigation....

"Rose?"

She dropped the paper to look at the Doctor's half-open eyes. "Yeah? You okay?"

He licked his lips a few time. "Get 'em?"

"Get who?" Rose asked. She found a bucket of ice chips and fed one to him with a plastic spoon.

"Hrmph." He took a deep breath. "Bad guys. Get them?"

"Yeah," she said. "We caught the bad guys. Mostly."

"Brilliant." He gave her a soft grin and then fell asleep some more.

They arrived in Cardiff in the small hours of the morning, and Rose rode in a second ambulance to University of Wales Hosptial to see the Doctor safely checked in. Grace wasn't there, but a doctor named Stuart was. "I've been in touch with Dr. Holloway, and I'll be handling Dr. Noble's case personally," he said as he introduced himself. "The skin graft won't happen for a few days, until he's had some time to bounce back from the surgery. We've got all his records and files from Mexico City and from Torchwood...yeah, think that's it." He smiled at her. "Would you like to hang around until he wakes up?"

Rose thought about it, about how he said he'd missed her, about the kindness of making sure he didn't wake up alone in an unfamiliar place. Then she checked her watch. "No, thanks," she said. "I've got work in a few hours. I'll come by during my lunch."

"All right," Stuart said. "We'll be certain to call you if his condition changes."

"Thanks. I appreciate that."

She went home, changed into work clothes, and then slept for three solid hours face-down on her bed without even turning down the sheets. As soon as her alarm went off, she drank a quick cup of coffee, wolfed down a slice of toast and spent her bus ride trying not to nod off. Just another day in her life.

Chapter 19

On Friday, Rose started work on her Dover report and demanded restitution from Jake for her missing milk and lettuce. "You didn't say when you were getting back!" he protested. "I was doing you a favor!"

"What, did you think I'd spend two months in Mexico until he could walk again?" Rose asked.

"Thought you'd be taking some time off," he muttered, hunching his shoulders.

Rose rolled her eyes. "And do what? Camp out at his bedside? I've got work to do, and he's in good hands at the hospital, and he's so drugged up he barely knows what century it is."

"Just," Jake scratched the back of his neck. "S'what I'd do for Pierre, you know?"

Ouch. Rose sighed. "Jake, either you like the Doctor or you don't like him, please make up your mind."

"I...will dislike him less if and when he actually apologizes for what he did in Leeds," Jake concluded. "But I do like you, and I know you love him."

"Do I?" Rose asked.

"Of course you do," Jake said. "Otherwise you wouldn't have been acting like such a moron since he came."

"Well, I'm glad you're so sure of it," Rose said.

Jake raised his eyebrows at her. "Rose, you had to be halfway drunk to pick up your manorexic friend and you despised yourself the next morning, or so Grace has let slip. You're pathetically in love with him. Not that there's anything wrong with that-and now that he's not, you know, fucking up in my face once a week, I'm going to try to respect it."

"So maybe I'm still in love with him," Rose said. "That...might not be a good thing, you know."

He blinked at her. "You pick now to waver in your eternal devotion?"

"Shut up," Rose said.

"Right, sorry, that was bitchy." Jake leaned closer to her. "Still. Maybe I'm not the one who needs to be making up my mind in a hurry, eh?"

"He's between major surgeries," she said. "I think I've got a bit of time."

Saturday they met about the skin graft, and Rose finally got a good look at how extensive the burns were on the Doctor's right side; no wonder he was on so much medication, because the pain had to be terrible. "We've got a patch of donor skin that we'll graft on to cover this area," Stuart explained, sketching out an area that went from the Doctor's waist to his armpit on the photograph he held, "and the bit we've taken off your left arm, we'll graft on the right one, just here at the elbow. That should help preserve mobility of the joint, though of course you're not moving for a long time after we're done-can't take the risk of the grafts pulling free."

"How long is a long time?" the Doctor asked, scratching at a half-healed blister on his jaw.

"Two weeks, minimum," Stuart said. "Probably three, to make sure there's adequate blood flow to the grafted skin before we start stretching it. Between that and the cast, you'll be in PT for a while."

He grimaced, but said, "Well, better than death, eh? Don't like death at all. Much prefer agony over death, all things considered."

"Should've thought of that before you let a building fall on you," Rose said.

"I told you, it was part of a building," the Doctor said. "Not even a large part. A bit. A bit of a burning building fell on me, and you go about exaggerating everything."

"Well, it sounds so much more heroic that way," Rose said.

The Doctor straightened up a little, to the extent he was able, eyebrows rising. "Really? Heroic? You think so?"

"Just a bit," she said. "Don't want it to go to your head."

They smiled at each other. That was a start.

Sunday was the actual surgery, and after telling herself that he didn't need a babysitter Rose showed up halfway through with her laptop, and worked on her report until they moved him to the recovery ward. He was bundled up in what looked for all the world like giant water wings, which apparently had something to do with growing new blood vessels into the grafts; Rose watched him sleep for a while, but went home before he woke up.

Later, as usual. The hardest part could always keep until later.

By Tuesday, during her lunch visit, he was already frustrated with bed rest. "Give me something to do," he begged. "Anything. Crosswords, books, jigsaw puzzles. I've been playing this game with the hospital radio station, trying to count every word I hear that's not spelled with an E, that's how desperate I am."

"I could bring you some felt-tipped pens," Rose suggested. "Then you could decorate your cast."

The Doctor glared down the bed at his cast, a monstrosity that went from his heel to his hip, like something in a cartoon-apparently the only way they could guarantee to keep the fracture immobilized. "I couldn't reach it anyway," he said grumpily. "Not allowed to bend myself, remember? Otherwise my new zombie skin will peel off."

"Don't call it 'zombie skin,'" Rose said. "That's weird."

"What? It was a cadaver donation, they told me so. It's zombie skin." He shrugged with his left side only. "Don't get me wrong, it's better than some of the alternative approaches I've seen over the years, but that doesn't negate my right to find it creepy."

"Well, calling it zombie skin makes it worse," Rose said.

"And they're starting physical therapy already," he added. "I'm not allowed to get out of bed, but a man named Hans comes in every afternoon to bend the rest of me. Something about muscle atrophy. I haven't had a man's hands on my like that since Jack Harkness first tried Delurian ale, only I can't put Hans in the cellar until he sobers up."

Rose laughed. "You promised to show me pictures of that one, remember?"

"That's right, you were out like a light after the first shot, you lightweight." He sighed. "Ah, well. Least I've still got the memories."

"Mostly good ones, right?" Rose asked.

"Yeah," he said, with a little smile at her that broke her heart. "Mostly brilliant."

Later, a voice in her head said, now is later. But she couldn't bring herself to wipe that smile away. She made a show of checking her watch. "I've got to go," she said. "I'll bring you something, though-maybe one of those little DVD players."

"Want to sign the cast before you go?" he asked, pointing at it with his good arm.

There was a packet of markers on the bedside table, so she chose a blue one and wrote near his knee, where he'd be able to see it, Stop complaining! It could've been both arms! Then she signed with a flourish. "There. Now I don't have to be around to say it to you."

"You know, technically it is both arms," he said, showing her the bandage on his left where the skin graft had been removed. "It's just I'm still allowed to use this one."

"Then it's not really both arms," Rose said. "Same time tomorrow, okay?"

"Course," he said. "It's a date."

Weirdest date ever, Rose thought, then remembered who she was talking about. Okay, not so much. "Better not stand me up," she said, rising.

"That," he pointed out, "would require that I could stand up at all."

Of course, she ended up agonizing at Grace about it later. "It's like I can't help myself," she moaned as they walked to the bus stop together. "He just, he's him, and I start to remember why I loved him in the first place...or the original him, I mean. And this one's close enough that I could love him, too."

"You know," Grace said, "I'm starting to think you should be paying me for this."

Rose rolled her eyes. "Fine, go ahead, mock my pain."

"'Life is pain, Princess, and anyone who tries to tell you different is selling you something,'" Grace said, with a horrible fake accent that meant she was quoting something Rose didn't recognize.

"You're the one who told me to figure out what I want," Rose said. "And I sort of have done. But I don't want him to run out on me again."

"Which is perfectly reasonable," Grace said. "Have you told him this?"

"Oh, yeah, 'cause we're so brilliant at talking things out," Rose said.

"It's the only thing that ever works, hon," Grace said. "And since you've got a captive audience, there's no time like the present."

Rose sighed as the bus approached. "When he's feeling better, maybe. He's still a little bit stoned, or when he's not, he's grumpy."

"Sounds about usual, from what I've seen of him," Grace said.

"I'm going to tell him you said that!"

She came back the next day armed to the teeth: she'd raided a couple of shops and had crayons, markers, coloring books, glow-in-the-dark star stickers (for the cast) as well as all the puzzle books she could carry, and the collected works of Agatha Christie and Isaac Asimov-since he liked one and liked to make fun of the other in roughly equal measure. She'd thought about the DVD player, but it wouldn't fit in the bag and she was afraid of dropping it, so she saved it for a second trip.

She had to let a nurse search the bag, to make sure she wasn't bringing in any "contraband" (a phrase that made her want to try, just to see if she could-though what the Doctor would want with vodka and fireworks in the burn ward was a mystery to her). Then she headed inside, towards the Doctor's bed, but within fifty paces she could tell there was already somebody there-a nurse, maybe? An orderly bringing round the lunch trays? It was a vaguely familiar voice, and a woman's, but Rose didn't think the burn center had any female doctors on staff and surely a nurse wouldn't be talking a mile a minute--

But Donna Noble surely would.

Rose stopped dead in her tracks when she recognized her, and for a moment couldn't do anything but stare. She was wearing a charcoal-grey suit and a purple turtleneck, red hair pinned up with chopsticks, and talking-well, like Donna Noble, though Rose hadn't been around her much when there wasn't a horrible tragedy going on, so perhaps she didn't have the widest experience. The Doctor was looking at her raptly, though, like she was something wonderful, and Rose's stomach clamped down hard.

"...said I didn't have the brains for it, you know, but it's really not that hard, it's basically matchmaking, and my friends before the war always said I was ace at that, so I thought, you know, 'Why not? What've you got to lose?' And they all said I should try Edinburgh, you know, that was the place to be, but it's so cold and so bloody Scottish up there and I thought to myself--" Donna's torrent of words broke off, and she looked up as if she'd felt Rose staring at her. "Hello? Can I help you?"

She was looking at Rose with a politely blank expression, which answered the first question that had sluggishly drifted into her mind: this was not the other universe's Donna, the one with the Time Lord's mind. (The one who got to stay, an evil bit of her mind added.) This was the Donna of this universe, who'd never met Rose, never defeated the Daleks, never traveled with the Doctor...or at least, Rose didn't know of it. Her mouth started working again, albeit sluggishly. "Yeah...yeah, I'm here to see, um..."

"Rose!" the Doctor crowed, waving to her. "What are you just standing there for, eh? Come on, here-look who I found!" He was grinning from ear to ear. "Rose Prentice, this is Donna Noble, my oldest new friend. Donna, this is Rose Prentice, my...er...pretty much my everything."

"Oh!" Donna offered Rose a hand. "You didn't say-well, I didn't ask you, here I was prattling on about myself and not letting you get a word in, bad habit-so nice to meet you!"

Rose transferred the bag to her other hand so she could shake; Donna had a grip that could crush walnuts. "Nice to meet you, too," she muttered. "How, er, how did you--"

"-Meet John?" Donna finished before Rose could finish talking. "Oh, funny you should ask, really. I was down here chasing after one the specialists who hasn't been returning my calls, and I noticed there was a patient with the same name as me, and, well, I just got curious, and then John said hello and I guess we just sort of clicked!" She glanced at her watch and grimaced. "Oh, bollocks, and now I've wasted all that time-well, not wasted, it's been lovely-I do have to find this fellow and make him turn in his paperwork, and if he asks for another blank copy this time I'll shove it up his nose. Nice to meet you both!"

Donna grinned at them bother before darting away, heels click-clacking on the floor. Rose watched her go, then looked back at the Doctor, who was still grinning faintly. "That was..." Rose started to say, and realized she couldn't complete the sentence without saying something upsetting.

"Yeah," the Doctor said, and he was staring after Donna almost sadly. "She's brilliant, isn't she?"

"I guess," Rose said. "I mean, I don't-didn't know her very well."

"She is," he said firmly.

Rose set the back down on the chair, but found herself feeling too agitated to sit. "Why're you talking to her, anyway?" she asked. "I mean, it's not like she's the same one you left behind."

He gave his one-sided shrug again. "Just...old time's sake, I guess." Then he looked pointedly at the bag. "Is all this for me, then?"

"Yeah," Rose said. "I got all sorts of stuff, look-"

That was when she noticed his cast. Right above where she'd signed it, Donna had signed, in purple gel pen. Get well soon!!! with a flurry of hearts and smiles. Her signature was bigger than Rose's, actually. Her stomach roiled again.

"Looking," the Doctor said tentatively, because Rose had frozen with her hand in the bag.

"It's just books and stuff," she said, tossing a couple of Agatha Christies into his lap. "Nothing special. I, ah, actually have to go-working through lunch today-sorry."

"Wait, what?" the Doctor said. "Are you standing me up?"

"Sort of," she said. "See you tomorrow."

She spent the rest of the afternoon not finishing her Dover report, because she couldn't decide who, if anyone, she was supposed to be angry with here. After all, she and the Doctor weren't really together anymore, even if they weren't apart-just because he called her his pretty much everything didn't mean they were being exclusive anymore. She'd had her one-night stand with what's his name, the bloke she wasn't going to start calling the Manorexic because that would give Jake too much satisfaction. Unless she was willing to make a proper claim on him, she shouldn't begrudge the Doctor this.

Except what did he mean by old time's sake? Why would he go seek out Donna and not Martha or Sarah Jane or somebody? Well, he hadn't exactly sought her out, apparently, she'd just passed him by, but why call out to her? She wasn't the same person he knew before. (Neither was Mickey's gran, she reminded herself, and then groaned aloud.) This Donna might be completely different, might be, well, a person that works in a hospital, apparently, but not a doctor, and she might have a husband, or children, or the clap, or...or...

This is so going to get me sacked, she thought, but it was the work of a few minutes to run an ethically-dubious search on Donna in this universe through various government computers. Donna Noble, born November 12, 1968 in Chiswick. No living relatives-both parents listed as "missing," which probably meant they'd been converted by Cybermen and never identified, and a grandfather who'd died of natural causes during the war. Currently living in Cardiff, working for University of Wales Hospital in the human resources department; she never went to university but apparently had been taking night classes through a professional school to improve her qualifications. Bully for her and all that. Single, no children, the screen said.

"And so is he," Rose told herself grumpily. "You're just being catty now."

But then again, she was also his pretty much everything, so maybe she had the right? Or maybe not, unless she was ready to take up the official banner of Girlfriend again. And she'd been so busy wibbling about whether she should or shouldn't that she hadn't even stopped to think that maybe the Doctor didn't want her to.

She logged into the internal instant messenger.

prenticere: GRACE
prenticere: HELP
hollowaygr: Only if you promise to let me tell you about the new opera that opens next week.
prenticere: HATE YOU
prenticere: A LOT

She spun away from the computer and put her head on the desk. It didn't really accomplish anything.

She kept visiting, because it seemed a bit strange to drag the Doctor all the way back to Britain and then not visit; also, because Donna was there, and while Rose went through phases of resigned acceptance that the Doctor was moving on and so should she, they alternated with the determination not to give him up without a bloody fight. Donna, being staff, seemed able to come and go from the ward as she pleased regardless of visiting hours, and Rose got used to arriving and seeing her at the Doctor's bedside, maybe with a cup of tea, chattering away.

Sometimes the Doctor was smiling. Sometimes he wasn't. Sometimes he looked like he was a thousand miles away. Rose didn't know what it meant, didn't know at this point what she wanted it to mean. But she took heart that every time she came Donna immediately, politely excused herself and left without any fuss. Which meant something? Maybe?

The Doctor knew there was something on her mind; he couldn't not know, because the visits were getting more and more awkward. They were going to have to talk about it eventually. Later was eventually going to become now.

The fact that it took more than a week for Later to arrive was a testament to just how stubborn-or possibly stupid-they both were, though. Rose tried venting to just about everybody she knew short of Mr. Winslow on the subject, and kept getting the same advice Grace had given her, but what actually pushed them past the breaking point was a newspaper article about Dale's plea deal and who he might've named. Donna was picking it over when Rose showed up, lecturing on this person or that while the Doctor did a crossword; neither of them seemed particularly bothered by the other. "Oi, Rose!" Donna said. "Did you see this? John said you worked for Torchwood, got any inside information?"

"Can't comment on open cases," Rose said stiffly. Which wasn't fair, because she had liked Donna rather a lot in that parallel world, and this Donna was more like that one than that one was now-and the fact she could think that sentence would never cease to amaze her. Moreover, this Donna had never been anything but polite and friendly, and seemed pretty much oblivious to Rose's moods, to the point where Rose would almost label it willful ignorance.

Like now, when she shrugged and folded the paper back up. "Yeah, I know how it is, but I thought it was worth asking, you know? John, d'you want to read it yourself?"

"Mmm?" He looked up. "Nah, it's fine, take it. Hello, Rose."

"Doctor," she said.

"And here's me, saying goodbye." Donna tucked the paper in her oversized handbag and smiled at them both. "No rest for the wicked, am I right? See you both tomorrow."

Rose mumbled something and sat down in the visitor's chair. The Doctor put away his crossword. "So it sounds like congratulations are in order for you lot. You didn't mention it before."

"I said something about it on the blimp from Mexico," Rose said. "You were stoned at the time."

"Hmm. Well." He looked down at his lap, where his good hand was drumming the back of his bad one in a restless little rhythm. "I'm just saying, it's nice to know I didn't ruin everything."

There was a little bit of stress on everything that made Rose sit up straighter, though she couldn't say if she felt more pity or anger. "You didn't ask about it before now, except back then on the blimp," she pointed out. "It's been, what, over a month?"

"I didn't think you wanted to talk about it," he muttered.

"What about Jake?" she said. "D'you think he wants to talk about it? He's fine, by the way, but he's still pretty angry and he'd like to hear you apologize. I think everybody would."

"I said I was sorry," he protested.

"To me," Rose said. "And you never said what you were sorry for."

His face clouded over. "What, d'you want a formal letter? 'Cause I already wrote one, if you don't remember."

"That wasn't apologizing, that was quitting," Rose snapped.

"I didn't think I was wanted anymore," he said.

"You didn't wait long enough to find out!"

He looked like he was going to say something, but then shut his mouth; perhaps he'd realized at the same moment she did that they were doing it again, the same old hurtful dance. Only this time she had no intention of backing down, and he clearly wasn't up to driving forward. He dropped his head against the pillows again. "I did what I thought was right," he said tightly. "And I'm not sorry for that. But I am sorry that I didn't listen to you. That I hid things from you. That I wasn't good enough...yeah."

Rose took a deep breath and let it out. There was the easiest hard part, done. "Maybe it's for the best that you resigned," she said. The Doctor's head came up again. "For us, I mean. We made pretty awful team members."

"We used to be a great team," he said, almost accusingly.

"It wasn't our job, back then," Rose said.

"You were the reason I made it my job," the Doctor said. "Our job. I took the job with Torchwood for you."

"Hey, I took the job for you first," she snapped. "I took the job so I could find my way back to you. And now I've found you, and you're here, and...and I still have a job to do."

"Well, I don't," the Doctor said. "So where does that leave us?"

"I don't know," Rose confessed.

They say in silence for a few minutes, and Rose waited for him to speak up because if she had to start she'd say something like I like my job or I had a one-night stand with a manorexic or maybe we shouldn't need a job to be together.

"This isn't really about Torchwood at all, is it?" is what he finally, quietly, said.

Rose shook her head. "No. I don't think it's ever been, really."

"So where does that leave us?" he asked, and Rose still didn't know, so she got up and left the hospital.

Rose pushed it out of her mind for the afternoon-reviewing resumes, because their team still needed a fifth member-but it ate at her nonetheless. She came home to an empty apartment and ate leftover pizza for dinner, replaying the conversation in her head and wondering if she could've said something more or less or different. She hadn't said anything untrue, though, and there was no getting around that-she was putting her foot down, finally, and it was up to the Doctor to decide whether he could live with that. She didn't need him, no matter how much she wanted him; if he decided to go off with Donna or someone else entirely, she had no right to interfere.

She really wanted to hear somebody else tell her that, though, so she picked up her phone.

Grace wasn't answering, and Rose got indignant about that until she remembered it was opening night of the new opera and nothing short of an invasion would pull Grace away from that. Jackie wasn't answering, but Rose couldn't get too indignant about that because it was a Friday night and she and Pete were in the same city for it and the odds were even they'd gone out to do something special, possibly the Tony-free sort of special. Jake definitely wasn't going to answer, as he was almost healed and had a weekend with no official assignment to eat up his time, and anyway he was a good advice-giver but a crap shoulder-to-cry on.

That really narrowed her options down, didn't it?

"Hello?" Tosh answered after a couple things. "Everything okay?"

"Mostly," Rose said. "I need somebody to tell me I'm being an idiot."

Tosh paused. "Is there a specific reason why, or are you an idiot in general?"

Rose sighed. "Some stuff happened with the Doctor today. John, I mean. I know I did the right thing but I could use the validation."

"No offense, Rose," she said uneasily, "but I knew anything about relationships I wouldn't be the only single Japanese woman in the Northern hemisphere."

"You are not," Rose said. "Besides, what's it matter if you're not married? You're only, what, thirty?"

Tosh chuckled. "Just for that, Rose, I'm not going to lecture you about Japanese culture. But if my mother is any source to go by, yes, I'm the only one and I'll never find a man unless I stop talking about computers and start letting them win at chess."

"Oh, to hell with that," Rose said. "You're perfect just the way you are."

"Mmm, now if only we were both gay this would be the point when I hang up and race over to your flat with violins playing in the background." That made Rose laugh. "Though it would spoil the symmetry of the team now-three straight women and two gay men, no gynophiles allowed."

"And Grace might feel the odd one out if she were the only one who wasn't a bit queer," Rose added. Then she caught what Tosh said. "Wait, are you counting Ianto in that?"

"Shouldn't I be?" Tosh asked. "I already co-opt him for a lot of the drudge work and he did help in Dover. At the very least, he's an honorary team member."

"Jake might not like that," Rose said. "Territorial and all. Maybe Ianto can be the mascot?"

"Would he have to wear a gorilla suit or something?" Tosh asked.

"I was thinking a tennis skirt, actually," Rose said, warming to the distraction. "And pom-poms. Mustn't forget those."

"Sparkly ones," Tosh agreed. "Though I'm not sure he's got the legs for a tennis skirt."

"Well, have either of us ever seen his legs?" There was a knock on Rose's door, startling her a bit. Who'd be knocking at this hour? "Oi, hold on, I need to get that..."

She opened the door and found Donna standing on the other side, cheeks pink from the cold. "Hi," she said. "Thank god, this is the right address, I was afraid I'd be knocking on stranger's doors all night long."

"Can I help you?" Rose asked, reminding herself that she really did like Donna, it was the Doctor that made things weird.

"John asked me to give you something, actually," Donna said, and presented Rose with a bundle of...something...wrapped in a slightly grimy plastic grocery sack. There was no store logo on it, just a smiley face and the words Have a nice day! "Dunno what it is," Donna added before Rose could ask her. "He had me dig it out of that suitcase under his bed and he stuffed some things in there and asked me to drop it off here after work, and since it's not really that far out of my way I said I would and...I did." She shrugged a little.

Rose examined the bundle without unwrapping it yet; it was heavy and felt like a stack of loose papers. She vaguely remembered stuffing it into his suitcase back in Mexico, but at the time she'd been so preoccupied she hadn't stopped to wonder what it was. Apparently it was for her. "Thanks," she said. "It's good of you to help him out."

"Well, you know, a friend in need," Donna said with an awkward, forced little laugh..

"Yeah," Rose said, still examining the bag.

"I know it's none of my business," Donna blurted, fiddling with the little fob on the zipper of her purse. "So feel free to just, you know, shut the door in my face now, but...is everything...okay, with you and him?"

"What do you mean?" Rose asked, suppressing the urge to indeed shut the door, because it wasn't really Donna she had a problem with, and because Donna did look genuinely worried.

"It's just," Donna said, frowning a bit, "You don't ever call him by his name, it's always 'Doctor.' And John-when he talks about you-he always seems so sad."

That's how he talks about you, too, Rose almost said, but no, this Donna didn't know anything about parallel worlds or metacrises or a woman with her face and the Doctor's brain. Just the man with the Doctor's face and her surname who talked about Rose like someone he'd already lost. "We're going through some adjustments," Rose said. "Thanks for bringing the package by."

"Oh, not trouble at all," Donna said with a smile. "Like I said, friend in need. Have a good evening."

"You too." Rose shut the door, and barely remembered her phone. "Hey, Tosh, I'm gonna have to call you back."

"Everything all right?" Tosh asked. "Who was that?"

"Friend of John's," Rose said. "I'll see you at work on Monday, okay?"

"All right...see you then..."

Rose hung up and regarded the package. The smiley face and its message could actually be seen as a bit sinister, in a way. She set it on the kitchen table and slowly peeled away the plastic, revealing that it was indeed a stack of papers, loosely bound with a bit of string wrapped round the sides. The top sheet was bright pink, and said only, The 100-Day Diary in large block letters; when Rose turned it over, it turned out to be a flier from the hospital, reminding staff members about infection protocols. The rest of the stack was just as random: postcards, scraps of hotel stationary, old fliers, faded receipts, and nearest to the bottom, several pages that were apparently torn out of an Isaac Asimov novel, with random words underlined. And a plain piece of notebook paper written closely front and back.

She returned to the top of the stack. The first piece was a postcard of Cardiff itself, specifically the castle. What looked like poetry was written into the address space: "Home is where, when you have to go there / they have to take you in." "I should have called it / something you somehow haven't to deserve." In the space for the message, he'd just drawn a large heart, carefully cross-hatched to give it the illusion of depth.

A few layers deeper in the stack was a postcard of the Taj Mahal; Rose flipped it over and found it was addressed to her. In the space for a message, in the Doctor's scrawling, jagged handwriting, was a single sentence: Personally, I wouldn't be able to keep still long enough.

Next she pulled out a piece of stationary from a hotel in Bangalore with a single paragraph: Time used to be different for me. I could feel the ticking of the clock and the spinning of the earth and the slow decay of the uranium atom, and sometimes it was louder than the hearts and minds of other people. And now it's all sound and fury and I'm less than I was and it's the biggest puzzle I've ever had to solve. I remember how to navigate the heart of a star but I don't know how to be human, not like this.

Rose paged through more postcards and stationary, scraps of notebook paper and graph paper and a napkin with her face drawn in the center. She found a Sudoku puzzle torn out of a newspaper, but instead of numbers he'd penciled in the words LOSE and FIND in endless jumbled permutations. There was another letter written on the back of a menu card from a restaurant in Beijing: He's got my life, Rose. The TARDIS. The universe. But he doesn't have you. I think it's a fair trade off myself. I think I have to think that or else I'm going to go slightly mad and

She put the card down. She looked at the stack, and wondered if he'd been writing these the whole time he'd been gone, maybe even before that. She wondered why he'd sent them to her, why now, of all times, when she'd just gotten used to the idea that she didn't need him. Was it always going to be like this, a tug of war between the part of her that wanted the Doctor and everything else?

Only if I let it, she thought.

Very carefully, she shuffled the stack and put it in some kind of order, though the pieces were all too mismatched to ever be neat. She put it back in the dirty old sack and folded everything up neatly, so the battered yellow smiley was on top. Then she put the whole thing in an empty drawer in the bedroom, and told herself she didn't feel guilty for slamming it shut.

Chapter 20

She stopped visiting the Doctor in hospital after that. She went to London for the weekend instead, had dinner with her parents and minded Tony for them, and avoided talking about the Doctor as much as she could. When she got back on Sunday night, she looked at the drawer with the 100 Day Diary in it, but still didn't open it, because that was not her bloody responsibility. Suddenly being his pretty much everything didn't feel like such a good thing.

Monday was eaten up with interviews for her new team member-a mixed group of ex-military, technical specialists, and Torchwood agents from other departments-and so she dressed up and sat in a very small room with Mr. Winslow and asked people about their qualifications and their goals and what was their worst quality. She was sort of tempted to start rating people by how much they amused her, which was the biggest sign that none of them were really qualified-and the ones who came closest were so deadly serious about everything she didn't think they'd fit in. Winslow didn't seem pleased with her lukewarm assessments, but he was also determined not to assign them a new case until the position was filled, so Rose had plenty of time to be picky.

(She called the hospital and confirmed with the ward nurse that Donna visited the Doctor that day, and on Sunday as well. So it wasn't like she'd left him alone.)

Midway through her second day of interviews, however, she got cornered by Grace outside the ladies'. "So what's happened now?" she asked bluntly.

"With who?" Rose asked.

Grace sighed. "You haven't tried to bend my ear about your troubles with John for two weeks, and loathe though I am to admit it, I'm in withdrawal. I also have it on the authority of a little bird in the burn unit that you haven't been in to visit him for a couple of days."

"You're right, I haven't," Rose said. "And you were at the opera the last time I had a crisis, so I talked to Tosh about it."

"Tosh?" Grace echoed. "You're replacing me with Tosh? Rose, I'm wounded. And you didn't answer my first question."

Rose sighed and leaned against the wall between the toilet door and the water fountain. "It turns out that the Doctor might need me more than I need him," she said slowly. "And I obviously can't handle being responsible for his happiness. So I had to get some...some distance, I guess."

"You need distance," Grace said. "Rose, of course he needs you, he's from a parallel universe-you're the only person he knows here, right?"

"He's got Donna," Rose said.

"Donna who?"

"Donna, just, this person Donna from the hospital," because Rose wasn't even going to try to explain that one. "They have the same last name and they're like sisters or something now. She visits him all the time."

Grace studied her face a bit. "You know, I never noticed your eyes turn green before," she said.

"I'm not jealous of her," Rose said, because she wasn't, anymore.

"Then why are you avoiding John?" Grace said. "Because I don't really believe this 'needing distance' thing. Seeing him once a day, that was distance. Avoiding him altogether is avoidance. What are you afraid of?"

That I love him too much to let him go and he needs me to much for me to stay. Rose sighed. "That I won't get my happily ever after."

Grace looked at her sadly. "Oh, honey, there's no such thing."

"Figuring that one out, actually," Rose sighed.

Grace leaned against the wall next to her, casually bumping elbows. "You know, I forget how young you are, sometimes."

"I'm twenty-two," Rose protested.

"And I could be your mother," Grace pointed out. Then she evidently thought about that, and shuddered. "God, I could, couldn't I? Not that I hold it against you, but it doesn't do much for my ego here."

Rose straightened up. "So are you satisfied that I'm not abusing the Doctor, Mum? 'Cause I really do have to pee."

"Call me that again and I'll get my revenge at your next physical," Grace said. "And...Rose, I know you have to do what's best for you, but try not to hurt him too much in the process, okay?"

"Might be a bit late for that," Rose said under her breath, but Grace was already walking away and probably didn't hear her.

Eventually the interviews reached and breached Rose's tolerance for absolute dullness, and she tried to search for a way to protest that wouldn't have her whining like a child. She settled for, "Are you sure these people are best candidates, sir?"

"Their resumes are exceptional," Winslow huffed. "They came highly recommended."

"They're not...very impressive, though, are they, sir?" Rose tried hesitantly.

Winslow seemed to deflate a little bit. "I will admit I was expecting a bit more from them, yes."

"Maybe we've been looking at the wrong criteria," Rose suggested, though really at this point she was just thinking out loud. "I mean, they've all got loads of experience in their fields...some of them are already Torchwood employees...personality-wise, they're about as dull as doorknobs..."

"Of course, this isn't the best format to judge a person's character," Winslow pointed out. "We can't predict ahead of time how well they'll integrate into the team."

"I just feel like there's something else we should be looking for," she sighed.

"I'm certain there is," Winslow said conclusively. "But as we are running swiftly to the end our list of candidates, there's not a great deal of time to decide what that is-unless of course you have someone already in mind...."

"Of course, sir, I don't--" Wait a minute. Rose thought it over. Experienced, already employed, dull until you get to know them, and able to work well with the team she already had...for certain values of well, of course...

Winslow frowned at her. "Care to share your thoughts, Ms. Prentice?"

"No, sir," Rose said, then quickly amended, "I mean, I may have an idea, sir, but I'd like to ask him, first-if you don't mind, that is."

He studied her for a moment, then gestured to the door. "I await your revelation with bated breath, Ms. Prentice."

Rose took the lift down to her floor and caught Ianto at his desk, watering his bamboo plant. "Ianto. Walk with me."

He frowned at her. "Ma'am?"

"Don't call me that, just come here." She snagged his cuff and pulled him gently away from the desk, into the conference room. She shut the door and locked it, though it still did a pretty poor job of muffling the sound from the corridor; she supposed it served a symbolic function, though.

Ianto looked about stiffly, like he was waiting for someone to jump out shouting at him. "Is there some sort of a problem?" he asked, when she turned around to face him.

And she asked, "How would you like a transfer to the field division?"

He blinked. "I-a-me? What do you mean?"

"I've seen your file, remember?" Rose said. "You were an analyst with the old flagship office before the war, you already help Tosh with our technical support, you got great marks in school when you actually bothered to work, you've got just enough of a criminal record to make you interesting and you can tolerate Jake for long periods of time in enclosed spaces. And we do have the vacancy."

"I see," Ianto said, blinking rapidly.

"It's your choice," Rose said quickly, so he wouldn't feel like he was under attack. "I wanted to ask you before I brought it up with Mr. Winslow. If you're, you know, happy with...er...what is your actual job title?"

"Administrative assistant," he said. "Though I also answer to 'tea boy.'"

"So if you're happy being the tea boy I won't push you," Rose continued. "But I thought I'd give you a chance with this, if you wanted to take it."

Ianto's eyebrows were pushed together, making deep lines in his face. "You really...I mean, I've no field experience to speak of."

"You came to Dover with us," Rose pointed out.

"I stayed in the hotel almost the entire time," he pointed out.

"Everybody started somewhere," Rose declared. "And you'd have six months to get your fitness certification and a whole year to do the firearms course, and since you already have the driving license you just need to do the obstacle course."

His eyes widened slightly. "There's an obstacle course?"

"A short one," Rose said. "Not hard at all."

He dropped his head, thinking about it, and Rose tried to give him space to answer at his own pace.

"Well," he eventually said, "I'm hardly fit to replace Dr. Noble..."

"This isn't about replacing him," Rose said. "This isn't about replacing anybody. Nobody's going to judge you against Mickey or the Doctor." She paused. "Well, maybe against the Doctor, but so long as you don't blow up a crime scene, you can only improve on him.

"Ma'am?" Ianto asked dubiously. "I mean, er, Rose?"

"Sorry," she said, sighing. "Bad joke."

"Ah," he said. "I, ah, wasn't entirely certain."

"Don't worry about it," she said, leaning against the wall beside the door. "I know he made mistakes, and I know it's for the best that he left. If I'm not allowed to joke about it, who is?"

"There've been rumors," Ianto said, which was news to her. "That, er, that he might be coming back."

She snorted. "Oh, no, believe me. There's no danger of that."

"Wouldn't you like him back?" Ianto asked, and then grimaced, like he'd just realized he'd stepped over a line. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I shouldn't--"

"No, it's okay," Rose said, and chose her next words carefully. "I...would possibly like him back in a different capacity, let's say. Things clearly weren't working out as they were, but if we could come to a more equitable working relationship, with some pretty clear boundaries...then yeah. If that's possible, I'd gladly have him back."

Ianto stared at her a moment, then cleared his throat. "You, ah, you aren't actually talking about Torchwood, are you?"

"No," Rose said, "because Tosh is listening on the other side of the door."

There was a muffled thump, and a bit of practical Japanese that Rose would have to file away for future reference. Ianto raised an eyebrow.

"I heard her double back and stop," Rose explained. "She's got new shoes on."

"Ah."

"So are you in or not?"

He squirmed a little. "I don't suppose I'm allowed to go home and sleep on it?"

"Sure you can," Rose said. "Sleep on it. Talk to Freddy. Do whatever it is you have to do. But we will need an answer sooner rather than later."

"All right. Thank you." He started to unlock the door, then paused. "Just for reference, if I do join your team, wouldn't it be technically correct for me to address you as 'ma'am'?"

"Don't push your luck," Rose said, and was rewarded with a small, cheeky smile as he slipped out the door. Tosh had made herself scarce again, and so now all she had to do was convince Mr. Winslow that promoting the tea boy was a worthwhile personnel move.

The youth of Cardiff did not seem to understand the eve component of Bonfire Eve, as there were firecrackers going off in the alley before Rose's alarm in spite of the cold and rain. Of course, not that long ago she'd been one the kids running round at all hours for the whole first week of November, getting a bit drunk with Mickey and messing about with sparklers and roman candles back on the estate...it seemed like she'd lived an entire lifetime between then and now, sometimes. Lost so much, and gained so much in the balance.

"You're being maudlin and it's not even lunchtime," she told the bathroom mirror. "Stop it this instant."

She got through her morning without even looking at the Doctor's diary in its hiding place, and found no sign of the offending merry-makers when she splashed downstairs to meet her bus. At the office, the desk in the middle of the corridor was empty and clean of even the bamboo plant, but there was coffee on, which meant Ianto couldn't have gotten far. As soon as she'd dried out and warmed up somewhat, Rose logged into the instant messenger.

prenticere: Team meeting, my office, this means everyone
simmondsjw: but its eeeeearly
prenticere: Whinger
hollowaygr: Be a minute, haven't had coffee yet
hollowaygr: is ianto even here today?
satot: I saw himi n the lobby
simmondsjw: somebody stole his bamboo
simmondsjw: the bastards
simmondsjw: we must avenge it
prenticere: No vengence until after the meeting

She made certain to clean off all her guest chairs and the corner of the desk where Jake would inevitably sit, before sending a few quick text messages. Her team filtered in, clutching their coffee like the lifeline it was, and settled themselves. "So what's the news?" Grace asked. "Do we have a new case?"

"New lab equipment?" Tosh guessed.

Jake perched on the desk. "Raises?"

"Wrong, wrong, and wrong," Rose said. "The real reason is, Mr. Winslow's finally found us another team member."

"Found?" Grace said with a raised eyebrow. "Internally? Anyone we'd know?"

"And did it take you two long enough?" Jake asked.

Rose smiled herself. "It's an internal hire, yeah, and if you'd volunteered to help, Jake, it might've gone faster."

"Nah, I don't like traumatizing the new people," Jake said. "So who's the latest victim?"

"Someone I think we all already know and value," Rose said. She raised her voice, so she'd be audible through the door. "You can come in now."

Ianto stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He appeared to have purchased a new suit just for the occasion. "Ma'am," he said.

"Watch it," she shot back.

It took a moment-it was really rather early in the morning-but Rose knew Jake had cottoned on when he nearly snorted coffee out his nose. "Him?" he protested. "You promoted the tea boy?"

"Which, by definition, makes him not the tea boy anymore," Grace said.

Tosh grinned. "Congratulations, Ianto."

"Just as long as you keep fixing the coffee," Grace said. "Or at least teach the new person your secrets. Are we getting a new person?"

"We'd better get a new person," Jake said darkly. "I save the world for a living, I'm not making my own coffee."

"Mr. Winslow says a new case should be coming down the pipe in a day or two," Rose said. "And whether we get a new administrative assistant is not his department. So remember, Ianto, there's still time to change your mind and flee."

"I'll take that under advisement," he said.

The rest of the day she spent working on paperwork in a desultory fashion, except for when everyone was co-opted into an elaborate office swap, as Grace took over Mickey's old space, Tosh moved into Grace's, Ianto took Tosh's and all the bits and bobs nobody wanted ended up in the Doctor's old office, which still had a smoke stain on the ceiling. But mostly there was paperwork. She could hear the others talking in the halls on and off, but she assumed they were negotiating over office supplies or sorting out mixed-up computer cables or something like that. She was just considering whether she could take off early for the day when Jake stuck his head into her office. "Oi, looks like the great migration's settled down," he said. "You maybe wanna do drinks tonight? Remember the fifth of November and all that?"

Rose thought about it, but the strange melancholy from that morning had stuck with her, and so she shook her head. "No thanks, not in this weather. Think I'll stay in tonight."

"You sure?" he asked. "Pierre's working late on some thing with people."

"Maybe another time," she said.

As she walked home, hunched under her umbrella, she tried to sort out why she was feeling so grim. Was it just the weather? Was it finally, permanently (she hoped) filling that last slot on her team? Was it that she'd gone nearly a week without seeing the Doctor, and except for that bag of papers he'd labeled a diary, hadn't heard from him, either? She was waiting for him to make the next move, only apparently the Diary was his next move, so what was she meant to do with it? Give it back with a sticker that said Return to Sender?

She fixed dinner and watched some television. She had a glass of wine.

What the hell was her next move?

Someone knocked on the door.

Rose had changed into her pajamas, and for a few minutes strongly considered ignoring the knock even though it'd be obvious from the lights that she was home. The knock got louder, and more insistent. She still hesitated, because she was in a bad mood and getting pranked by some kids in Guy Fawkes masks wasn't going to do anything to help that.

Her phone beeped at her. Message from Grace, the screen said.

Answer your damn door, was the message.

Rose ran into the bedroom to pull on a sweater, to look at least a little more put together than she was, and opened the door, wondering why Grace wouldn't just call ahead, or maybe shout through the door instead of using a text message, and what was Grace doing here tonight anyway--

On the other side of the door stood the Doctor. "Hi," he said, looking pink in the face. "Can I come in now?"

Rose knew she was gaping like a fish and couldn't help it. He was standing there, really physically there, leaning on crutches; his hair was a little damp despite the coat thrown over his shoulders, and under the coat he was wearing a blue flannel robe that had the UWH logo sewn on the breast. He didn't even have proper shoes, just a slipper over his good foot and a sock stretched partway over his cast; bulky bandages still protruded from his right sleeve, and he seemed to have trouble gripping his crutch on that side.

The old blisters on his face had basically healed, though, and he'd shaved recently, and he was on her doorstep asking to come in.

"Pretty please?" he added. "It's cold out here."

"What the hell are you doing here?" she asked as he hobbled inside. "You're supposed to be on bed rest! That means not moving!"

"I needed to talk to you," he said. "And Grace said it was okay."

"Grace-" Rose looked stupidly at her phone again, and then made to open the door and find that woman and ask her what part of the Hippocratic Oath covered this sort of situation. The Doctor, unable to maneuver quickly, nevertheless did his best to stop her by whacking her in the shin with his left crutch. "Ouch! Don't do that!"

"You really need to listen to me," he said, "because I came all this way to talk to you and Grace said it was okay and it wasn't even her idea, it was Donna's, and also I have been bedridden for like three weeks and I don't know how much longer I can stay on my feet here."

That last bit is what stopped Rose, finally. She studied him, met the intensity of his stare and folded her arms across her chest. "All right," she said. "I'm listening."

"Listening. All right. Good. This is...progress." He took a deep breath. "I didn't actually think I'd get this far, so, you know, I don't have any prepared remarks--"

"D'you want to sit down?" Rose asked, because this seemed like it was going to take a while.

"No, I do not," he said firmly, and inhaled deeply again. And again. Any more and he'd be technically hyperventillating. "So I," he finally began, "have come to realize that I may not have been entirely clear with you about things, and that we need to talk, and that we are pretty fantastically bad at talking, and...yes."

"So you came here to talk," Rose said.

"I did," he said. "Because I think that saying I'm sorry is starting to lose its efficacy."

Rose snorted; should couldn't help it. "Lose its efficacy, yeah. Lost it a couple of fights ago."

"Even though it's true," he said ruefully. "I've been hurting you and I never intended to do that."

"I know you didn't mean to do it. Don't you see that just makes it worse?" she asked. "You promised back in Norway that you'd follow me wherever I wanted to go. How long did that last?"

"I didn't know-did you get the Diary?" he asked. "I gave Donna, I gave her this thing to give to you, she said you got it--"

"I got it," she said. "I didn't read it, though."

He blinked. "Why not? Everybody reads diaries! That's what you do when you find someone's diary, you read it and find out what they really think of you!"

"So what do you really think of me, Doctor?" Rose asked. "What's in there that you can't say to my face?"

"Everything," he said. "Rose, this whole mess-I had to go all the way around the world to figure out where I wanted to be. Who I wanted to be. And it's all in the Diary, everything I decided, and I wrote you a letter, did you read the letter?"

"When were you planning to come back?" she asked, instead of reiterating that she hadn't read it, hadn't read any of it. "I didn't find any tickets in your hotel room in Mexico. If you figured all this stuff out, when were you planning to come back and tell me?"

"I'm telling you now," he said. "I ran into this little problem where I almost died, see, and but then I woke up and you were there and that was when I knew, see, when I knew I didn't want to go another day without seeing you again-because I did that, Rose, back in the other world, I did everything in my power to stop loving you and I thought it worked right up to the moment I saw you again," he said, and took another deep breath, and swallowed.

Rose searched for something to say to that, something that wasn't going to make her cry. "So you decided you loved me," she said, "and your first move was to start hitting on Donna?"

"What?" he blurted.

"You're always talking to her!" she said. "She's the one you-he--other you took away with him! Were you in love with her, too, back in the other world?"

"No!" he said, aghast. "And quite frankly, I'm getting bloody sick of having to tell everybody in two bloody universes that we're not together!"

"Then why start talking to her?" Rose asked. "Why keep talking to her? Every day now she's by your bed, even when I'm not."

"That," the Doctor said, "is a gross misuse of your powers of surveillance."

"Doctor."

He looked down at his slippers, which were blue flannel like the robe; Rose had seen him save the world in slippers and a robe, but now they just emphasized his bandages and burns and the cast on his leg. "I run," he said, apropos of nothing. "Ever since I was a child, I've run away from things that scared me. Things I didn't want. There's no consequences if I'm a moving target, and I...I mean, I even ran away from you."

"Because you don't want me?" Rose asked.

"Because I'm scared," he said, looking up with big wounded eyes. "The other me...why d'you think he left me here? Because he...we...I..." He shuddered like something pained him, and started again. "I don't know who or what I am anymore, with a Time Lord's brain in a human body. But there's a bit of Donna in here, too, and I need that right now-I need her courage, I need her passion, I need her bloody stubbornness to be a part of me, too. Because I love you and I want you and it scares the hell out of me. It scares me enough that the other me, the real one, he ran away again, because I think he knew that if anybody in the universe could finally make him stop, it would be you."

"But you still ran," Rose said, holding onto a handful of anger. "You ran halfway around the world and nearly got yourself killed."

"I ran away because I thought I wasn't welcome," he said. "Because I'm different to the man you fell in love with, and even I'm just starting to figure out how, and if I don't even know who I am..." He snorted softly, looking off to one side. "It took nine hundred years, but I've run so far and so fast that I've finally outrun myself."

"You're not the only one who's different, Doctor," Rose said.

"I know," he said with a miserable sigh. "I know, Rose, and it's brilliant, you are brilliant, you...are everything you could never be with me."

A lump rose in her throat, and she took a step towards him. "Not with you. With him. That other skinny bloke, the one who couldn't even tell me what he felt when he knew he'll never see me again."

The Doctor looked wary now, but he was watching her every movement with stiff anticipation. "We're not that different, him and me," he said.

"You're different enough," she said. "And the same, enough."

"I hope so," he said. "I really, really hope so."

"Hope's not good enough," she said.

He shut his eyes, nostrils flaring. "I will be," he said. "Rose, I don't every want to hurt you again, and I will be the man that's worthy of you...which apparently means learning how to let someone else lead." He opened his eyes again. "If you still want me, I mean. It's always been up to you."

Rose took a deep breath of her own, because he'd promised her that once before and let her down, because she knew how love could change people, because from the beginning this had been the very definition of a second chance. She looked him in the eye and extended her hand. "I don't think we've been properly introduced yet," she said, trying to keep her voice from cracking. "I'm Rose Prentice, Torchwood."

He looked at her warily for a few moments, and she fought the urge to drop her hand, until he finally took it in his; the old burns were oddly smooth under her fingers, and the bulky bandages came up past his wrist. "Dr. John Noble," he said huskily, like he was still testing the sound of it after all these months. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Prentice."

"The feeling is mutual," Rose said. She looked into his eyes-John's eyes-and saw the same sort of giddy terror that was bubbling up inside her; she let out a giggle, and he started to look mildly panicked, and so for the first time in far too long she stretched up on her toes and properly kissed him. He let out a little squeal and wobbled on his crutches; Rose clutched at his robe to help him keep balanced; then let one crutch clatter to the floor so he could wrap an arm around the small of her back and kiss her properly. It was warm and familiar in all the right ways, all the ways she had wanted, but when they broke for air in perfect synch the look on John's face was wondering and terrified and totally new.

"There is," he said after a moment, "a high probability that this will end very badly."

"That's usually part of the fun, isn't it?" Rose asked.

"Only if we survive it," John said, brows furrowing.

Rose laid her head on his chest, drawing him close. "I've only just met you," she said. "I'm not going to let you get away that easily."

"Mmm," he said. "What if I told you I was about to fall over right here on the floor?"

Rose looked up sharply. "Are you about to fall over on the floor?"

"Well, I did just get out of hospital," he said. "Not, technically speaking, with permission, either."

"I thought Grace said it was okay," Rose protested.

"Grace isn't my doctor," he pointed out.

"Ah. Right," Rose said, and found her hands fiddling with the lapel of his robe. "I suppose we don't want Grace and Donna to get into any trouble on our account."

"I'm supposed to be released soon, though," he said. "Except for outpatient therapy with good old Hans."

"Good old Hans," Rose echoed. "I'll have to start chaperoning those sessions so he doesn't get any ideas. After I welcome you home properly."

"I'll still have my cast another month," he pointed out.

She shrugged. "I can work with casts."

Eventually, of course, she did let him go, and noticed that he was looking rather more pale than she was used to. She fetched him his crutch, which he leaned on ever more heavily, and helped him back to the door. He looked down at her, and suddenly blurted, "Thank you. For everything. I mean it, Rose, I--"

"Shush," she said. "Just promise you're going to keep coming back."

He smiled a bit. "Well, I had such grand plans for the curtains in here--"

Rose snorted and unlocked the door; on the other side, Donna and Grace were waiting, and Donna at least wasn't even pretending she hadn't been listening at the keyhole. "Thank you, too," Rose said. "Both of you."

"Oh, it's nothing," Donna said, tossing her hair. "I'm just a sucker for an old-fashioned love story. After all, somebody has to be getting some around here, even if it's not me..."

John snorted and winked at Rose, as if to say, see why I like her? Grace, however, took him by the elbow. "And now is the time for all good little boys to get back in their assigned beds," she said firmly.

"And what makes you think I'm a good little boy, Dr. Holloway?" John asked.

"Be nice," Rose said. "They could just leave you here and say you'd run away."

"All right, all right," he grumbled.

They walked downstairs together, where Grace's rarely-seen car was illegally parked in the alley; getting John in the back seat took a little creativity, but eventually he was sprawled out sideways, leaning on the locked door while his cast propped against the opposite window. "This is so not safe," Rose pointed out.

"Don't worry," Grace said. "If he wasn't healing right on schedule, I wouldn't have let him out. And I drive slowly."

"See you tomorrow?" John asked, lolling his head out of the open rear window.

Rose smiled and kissed him again. "Tomorrow."

"G'night, Rose," he said.

"Night, John." That made him grin even wider.

"Are you kids done?" Grace asked. "I'm not entirely convinced nobody's going to steal my hubcaps tonight.

"Go on, then," Rose said. "This is why you're still single, Grace. You're grumpy."

Donna looked at Grace as she slowly started backing out of the alley, and Rose caught a few words before the Doctor rolled up his window all the way. "You too, eh? I know how that is, believe me. Hey, have you ever been to that Italian place by the Plass? I hear they do a singles night--"

Rose laughed, and stood in the cold and damp, watching until they drove out of sight.

EPILOGUE: To Sail Beyond

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"

Rose was in a meeting when her phone rang. Message from John, the screen said, and she slipped it into her pocket with a grimace. "Sorry," she said. "Carry on."

Ianto continued like there had been no interruption. "Anyway, I've requested another wiretap on Johnson's business line, and Grace is pulling up background checks on all the employees."

"Great," Rose said. "I'll get Tosh to start satellite surveillance of the site, just in case." In her pocket the phone beeped again.

"Sounds like you want to answer that," Ianto said, and excused himself.

Rose pulled her phone out and checked it. (2) Messages from John, of course. She opened the first one:

So what time are you going to be home? J

And the second.

No, correction-you WILL be home at four, I have SURPRISES for you. J

Rose took a minute to consider just what he'd consider a surprise and the potential risks of not being on the scene in time. Is it going to explode if I'm not there? She sent back.

No, but I shall be very unhappy. J

I think you'll live.

Go say hi to Brynn for me, will you? J

Rose had no idea where that came from, and was a little afraid to ask; but she'd been cooped up inside all day, doing the legal and financial background work, and it was an excuse to stretch her legs. She put up a note on her screen that said back in 5 and headed down to the lobby.

Brynn was experimenting with new, even more low-cut tops this week on account of an early, tentative heat wave; even judging by the changed climate of recent years, it was far too beautiful for April and they would probably have a miserably cold, wet May to make up for it. That meant everyone was trying to enjoy the weather while it lasted, in their own way, including Brynn. "Hello, Rose!" she said as Rose sidled up to the desk. "How's your day going?"

"Fine, boring, the usual," Rose said. "What about you?"

"Oh, nothing special." Brynn took an emery board to her nails. "I saw Dr. N today, did you know that?"

The little alarm in Rose's head that had started beeping fitfully when John called suddenly redoubled itself. "You did? Where?"

"Well, here," Brynn said. "He said his boss needed him to look for something in the archives. Had the letters and everything. I called an archivist down to help him out."

Okay. If it was authorized, it couldn't be that bad. Then again, John had access to a computer, a printer, and a wide variety of stamps when he went to London. What could he possibly want to show her out of the vaults? "He didn't tell me he was coming by," Rose murmured.

"Well, he seemed like he was in a bit of a hurry," Brynn said. "Went running out with something in a suitcase, wouldn't let the security boys see it, not even Freddy. Used a ninety-nine on us."

This was getting better and better. "Right. I, um, I need to make a phone call, nice talking with you."

She waited until she was in the lift to call him. "So are you coming?" is how he answered.

"What did you take from the vaults?" she asked.

"That's the surprise part," he said. "Come and have a look."

"I'm at work!"

"Well, so was I, but this is important, you can take a few hours off..."

She sighed and checked her watch. "Give me half an hour to touch base with Jake and then I'll come."

"Brilliant! That gives me time to get it all set up. Love you."

"Love you, too."

It took her longer than half an hour, though, because the bus she needed was running late and while it was unseasonably warm, it wasn't so warm that she wanted to walk to the next stop if she could help it. John didn't call back, though, so obviously he'd either discovered patience (not likely, when he had something to show her) or he was busy setting up whatever he was setting up. The fact that it needed setting up was worrisome all by itself.

When she did get back, she saw John's car parked illegally in the alley, so she knew he was home. After all his going on about what a cool car it would be, he'd bought himself some kind of antique roadster and had it painted an awful bright yellow. He'd even named the damn thing. Rose gave it a pat on the hood anyway as she passed it, and trotted up the steps, already making contingency plans.

"Aha! There you are!" he crowed as she came in; he was doing something on the table by the television that she couldn't see clearly. "Right on time, because it took a little longer to set up that I thought it would, but I read the instructions this time, and I think I've just about...ack! Stay over there!"

He flailed his arms at her, so she just got a glimpse of something that she hoped wasn't actually a fish tank. "You know, one of these days you're going to get a parking ticket if you keep leaving your car in the alley," she informed him.

"No, I'm not," he said.

"You so are."

"I'm not," he said, waving a hand at her over his shoulder, "because I installed a stealth device while you were off on the Isle of Man. When it's engaged, you can't see the car unless you already know it's there. I wouldn't leave Bessie Junior in danger like that."

"Why do you call her Bessie Junior, anyway?" Rose asked. She eyed the pile of debris around the rubbish bin: a sticker for an aquarium (oh god,) packaging for an ultraviolent lamp, a bottle of bath salt, a box for baby monitors...wait a minute, baby monitors?

"John?" she asked warily.

"Almost got it," he said. "Just....yeah!" He stood up, keeping his body between Rose and whatever was in the aquarium, which was now harshly lit. "Okay, you've got to close your eyes."

Rose took a deep breath and closed them. A moment later, she felt him walk past her, stand close behind, and cover her eyes with one hand. The other hand settled on her shoulder and urged her forward, gently, while he followed behind; she noticed he was limping a little on the right side, which probably meant the end of the good weather was at hand. She took one step forward, and another, and--"Ow!"

"Er, right, sorry," he said, steering her to one side. "Chair. You're almost there...and, stop." He took his hand away. "Surprise!"

She looked down into the aquarium. There was about an inch of murky water in the bottom, and a chuck of something-volcanic rock, or maybe some kind of coral-- in the middle of it. The heat lamp was affixed to one side of the tank, spotlighting the rock, and a contraption of wires and electrical tape that might've once been one if not two baby monitors was attached to the other side, emitting a whine so soft and high it was barely audible. "What...er...I mean, it's nice," she stammered.

"You don't know what it is, do you?" he asked, but he sounded playful, not annoyed.

"Not a clue," she said.

He came around the other side of the table and reached into the tank, gently stroking a ridge of the rock. Rose thought she saw a faint golden sparkle somewhere deep inside it. "It's a TARDIS," he said.

"Are you serious?" she asked, bending down for a closer look. It sort of looked like some bits and bobs she'd seen inside in the TARDIS on occasion, and of course she had no idea what they looked like when they weren't being police boxes...but still...

"Well, it's just a little one," John said. "Part of a pseudopod, barely viable-it must've broken off a parent and fallen through the Rift. Torchwood wouldn't have been able to get anything off it but radiation, so they crated it up in the archives."

Rose looked at him, staring raptly at the rock-or the TARDIS, apparently. He'd always had a special connection to that ship. "How'd you know it was down there?" she asked.

"I didn't," he confessed. "Pete sent me to look for something else, it's a thing, they'll brief you about it later-couldn't find what I went in for, incidentally, but while we were leaving I took a wrong turn and spotted the poor thing half-dead in a box of volcanic specimens."

"So it's alive?" she asked, even though all the production of the aquarium would've been moot if it weren't.

"Oh, yeah," he said, adjusting something about the lamp. "Weak, but alive. Give it a little love and some time I think it'll grow up nicely.

"How much time?" Rose asked. For a moment she wasn't sure if she were excited or nervous about what the answer would be.

"A lot of time," John said. "Maybe a century before we can even start the carving, and after that...well...let's just say it's the absolute definition of a long-term investment." And he smirked at her.

"So we're doing long-term investments then, yeah?" Rose asked, touching the edge of the aquarium.

"Oh, absolutely," John said, and stopped fiddling with the lamp finally. He stood up. "Plus, you know, this makes a great starter for me, I think."

She knew she'd regret it, but she asked anyway. "Starter for what?"

"Babies," he said, and then broke into giggles at the look on her face. "No, see, look, it's the first step, yeah? It's basically a pet rock. I'm pretty certain I can't abandon or traumatize a rock. Next step would be something like a hermit crab, and then maybe, I don't know, a budgie..."

"And then a baby?"

"Well, I was thinking there'd be a couple of more mammalian steps in between, but eventually...yeah." He suddenly looked away, scratching at the back of his head. "If, you know, you're interested. 'Cause if you're not I reckon I can go in halvesies with Donna and sort of, you know, it'd be a rental..."

"Oh, no," Rose said, seizing him by the belt and pulling him in. "You're not reproducing with Donna. That's like...she's like your sister, isn't she?"

"That's a minor technicality of which she isn't actually aware," John said. "Also, the Hapsburgs did it."

Rose ran a finger up the button band of his shirt. "I'm terrified enough by the idea of you and Donna having children without bringing the Hapsburgs into it."

John pretended to think a moment. "We do both have some fairly alarming heritable traits," he admitted.

"Besides," Rose said. "I want you all to myself."

"Mmm...that can be arranged." He bent down and kissed her, slow and sloppy, hauling her partway up as she pulled him partway down. "Especially if you want to do some rehearsal for the eventual hypothetical babies."

"Practice makes perfect," Rose said, and John grinned and started pulling her into the bedroom; but she hung back for a minute, to look at the coral-rock-thingy under its lamp. Her and her Doctor and their TARDIS; some things were just meant to be.