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“I know that sound,” the Doctor says.
Instinct has her checking behind her, screwdriver lifted, but the TARDIS is intact, material, right where they left it. Yas frowns, following her eyeline, and then they both turn back to stare as the TARDIS also begins to materialize, blue and boxy as ever, right in front of them.
“But—” Yas says, hair whipping as she double-checks again. One TARDIS behind. One in front. “How—”
“Time-traveller, remember?” the Doctor says, searching her memory as her sonic reads the incoming ship. Not that she usually remembered these sorts of encounters with herself—himself? Whichever. “Strictly speaking, it’s generally a bad idea to twist up your own timelines like this, so we might want to…”
She trails off, staring at the sonic’s readings. Yas steps closer.
“Doctor?” she asked.
“That’s not my TARDIS.”
The police box has landed, and the Doctor’s eyes rake it over. Practically identical, if out of date. But the readings…
“Do they all look like that, then?”
Ryan and Graham have emerged from her TARDIS, looking bemused. The Doctor glances back at her readings, then raises the screwdriver toward the imposter ship as indistinct voices catch her ears.
“No, they don’t,” she says, something rising up in her from deep within. Was it fear? Apprehension? Guilt?
Joy?
Yasmin is watching her carefully. “Then Doctor, it must be yours. From a different time, yeah?”
The Doctor doesn’t take her eyes off the TARDIS’ door as it begins to open.
“Not a different time,” she says. “A different universe.”
The voices are clear, now.
“I’ll scope out ahead, see if we can get a lock on that signal, yeah? Let me know when you get that spiro-thingy working.”
“Spi-ro-gra-phic monitor! Monitors the spirals, makes the graphs. Not that hard to—”
“Yes, dear,” calls the girl, now emerging from the TARDIS. Her head is turned, and her hair is blonde, and the Doctor is transported a millennium into the past. More. “Make sure you tell me if anything—”
She stops short, staring, first at the TARDIS before her, then at the four of them. Her hair is long, like it used to be when the Doctor first met her. She wears black leather still, and sky blue beneath. A high tech device is strapped to her wrist, and she carries something like a tablet in her hands. The Doctor watches as her eyes travel around the companions, back to the TARDIS, and fall squarely on the sonic screwdriver still raised in her direction.
Rose Tyler goes very still.
“Doctor?”
The Doctor finds she cannot speak.
“Rose? Is everything all right, you—”
Her past self, three regenerations, more lifetimes ago, emerges from the strange TARDIS and takes in what he sees.
“Oh,” he says, and breaks into a wide smile. “Brilliant.”
**
There is much to be said, of course, and no way to know how to start saying it, but thankfully at that moment the aliens whose ship they have inadvertently invaded choose to burst into the engine room they occupy, two TARDISes, two Doctors, three companions and one, singular, Rose Tyler.
“Run!” the Doctor shouts, and if her former self shouts it too, it can’t be helped.
They run, and duck, and the Doctor sonics a water pipe here, her compatriot sonics another there, anything to slow down their pursuers. Ryan pulls open a hatch to reveal a small passageway behind. “In here!” he gestures, as Yas and Graham duck in and Rose Tyler pulls the pin from something not quite like a grenade, tossing it down the hall before clambouring in after them.
“What was that?” asks Graham, covering his ears.
“Sonic grenade,” Rose says, “Temporary paralysis. Should buy us time.”
There’s a flash, and the sound of several heavy bodies hitting metal, and the Doctor faces off with the Doctor at the entry to the passage.
“Blimey,” he says. “Look at you. It’s about time, I’d say.”
“And look at you,” she replies. “All salt and pepper.”
“One of the perils, I suppose,” he says, running his hand through still-thick hair, ruefully. “One heart—”
“One life,” she finishes, but faintly.
“Oi!” Rose hollers from down the tunnel. “Get a shift on, Doctor!”
“Right!” they both call back, then eye each other.
“After you,” she says, exaggerating the gesture.
He doesn’t argue.
They find themselves all in another compartment of the spaceship, this one clearly for storage.
“Right,” says Yas, once they’ve established that the coast is clear. “Now what exactly is going on? Doctor, who are these people? And what’s all this about a parallel universe?”
“Well,” the Doctor says. Rose is tapping something into her tablet, and the Doctor’s younger self—rather, her alternate self—crosses the room to look over Rose’s shoulder, dropping a nonchalant kiss to her hair as he does so. “That’s me. Not me, exactly. More like a meta-crisis me that developed out of the diversion of regeneration energy into an old hand of mine… can I still call you Handy?”
The other Doctor eyes her over dark-framed glasses. “You know, I was never all that fond of that—”
“Wait a minute,” Graham says. “He’s you?”
“It’s a Time Lord thing,” she says, still watching Rose. “And she—”
Rose looks up, and meets her eyes.
How to describe what Rose Tyler had been to her? What her sudden reappearance was doing to her now, a thousand years later? She’d accepted the cold and bitter truth, that she was never going to see her again. She’d left her with the best possible alternative. Rose had become a cherished memory, a bright spot in a too-dark history, and now here she was, impossible and right in front of her, and the Doctor who never ran out of words just didn’t know what to say.
And Rose, of course, saves her and takes matters into her own hands.
“I’m Rose Tyler,” she says, smiling at Yas. “I used to travel with the Doctor.”
“Like we do now,” says Ryan.
Rose’s eyes flicker back to the Doctor. Her smile stays on, though her voice wobbles. “Just about.”
“But aren’t you still?” says Yas.
The other Doctor is being uncharacteristically quiet. He wears a dark blazer over a t-shirt and jeans, and there is that little bit of grey at his temples now, but he is otherwise just the same as she remembered him to be, looking in the mirror, getting to know another new body, another new self. He was born into joy, she remembers. And so much sorrow by the end.
This version of him hasn’t gotten quite that far.
Rose smiles again, and takes her Doctor’s hand. “Yes. I am.”
“You got the coral to grow then,” the Doctor says to him. “Donna’s solution worked?”
“It did,” he says, proudly. “That’s our Donna. Grew us a TARDIS in record time. Went with the police box for old time’s sake. Never thought—”
“Where is Donna, anyway?” Rose interrupts. “You didn’t drop her off in some alternate universe too, did ya?”
Her voice is sharp, and abrasive, and speaks of hurt, which is quite fair. The Doctor stood on a beach, turning her back, walking away while Rose wasn’t looking.
The other Doctor opens his mouth, thinks better of it, and shuts it again.
“She is living her life,” the Doctor says quietly. “Happily, I think.”
The other Doctor is watching her, and she knows that he knew, or would have worked out, the truth.
“So this is you,” says Yas, slowly. “A past you, but also a different you, and your… companion.” The word is weighted. “And they’re from a parallel universe. I didn’t know that was a thing.”
“It’s a thing,” says the Doctor. “But it’s supposed to be an impenetrable thing. I thought we’d agreed—”
This was directed at the other Doctor, which wasn’t strictly fair, because the conversation had never been held out loud. But it hadn’t needed to be. At the time, they were one and the same, and when they had stood on that beach the other Doctor had known exactly what to say, what to do, what to offer Rose, what she never could.
He had jumped at the chance, because she would have jumped at the chance, for one heart and one life with Rose Tyler.
“We’re not here on purpose,” Rose says. “We got knocked out of sync on our last trip and we don’t know why, the readings are off the chart—”
“Did you say something about a signal when you arrived?” the Doctor asks.
Between the two Doctors they make headway on a theory, their respective companions’ heads pinballing between them as they talk over each other, rapid fire. It’s easier to focus on this—something concrete, a mystery to solve, a scientific query—than to tangle with the self, and the other self, like this.
When they have successfully evaded their persistent alien pursuers and made it back to the twin TARDISes, the Doctor sets them all tasks, data collection, tweaks and repairs, whatever she can think of to keep them occupied and elsewhere as she wedges herself in the bowels of the other Doctor’s TARDIS, a blast from the past itself. The Doctor’s mind spins through possibilities, each readout on her sonic punctuated by one name, repeated: Rose! Rose! Rose!
She should have known that Yas would not be deterred.
“So,” says Yas.
The Doctor continues to fiddle with the wires, giving her sonic a shake.
“They’re a thing.”
The Doctor looks back to where Rose and the other Doctor speak quietly across the TARDIS. He’s placed his hands on her upper arms, like she used to do, and is rubbing them reassuringly, ducking his head so Rose would look into his eyes. She’s nodding, and giving him a watery smile.
“Never mind the fact that you used to be a bloke—”
“Twelve.”
“Pardon?”
“Twelve blokes. Well, thirteen. Technically. Really a bit lopsided, now that I give it a think—”
“Doctor!”
“Sorry.”
“Thirteen blokes then,” Yas says, shaking her head as though that was the only sort of response one could give to this sort of news. “And that bloke is in love with her.”
“Undeniably.”
“Which means that you were in love with her?”
A moment, where the Doctor considers the fact that she had never quite managed to say that out loud, when she was him.
“Yes.”
“Well, this must be awkward for you.”
“Yas,” the Doctor says. “It was a very long time ago.”
“Still,” Yas says. “Awkward.”
Why must she be so perceptive?
“I’m fine,” she says. “Now, we need to figure out a way to get them back to their own universe, or we will all be in an awkward situation with our unwilling alien hosts very soon.”
**
Rose’s eyes, always big and brown and expressive, are looking sadly at her now.
“Doctor,” she says, in the quiet of the TARDIS. They are alone. “How long has it been for you?”
The Doctor stops poking at the screen before her. Her shoulders drop. She turns to Rose.
“A thousand years. More.”
Rose’s lips part, the softest exhale. “Oh, Doctor.”
She approaches, as though toward a skittish animal, and lifts her hand to the Doctor’s cheek. “I hope you haven’t been alone.”
“Not always,” says the Doctor. “Not lately. I’ve got the fam.”
Her chipper tone does not dissuade Rose, who has always been able to see through her, better than most. She drops her hand.
“You said you were never going to leave me behind.”
Guilt, dormant, hungry, gnaws at her. “You seem happy with him.”
“I am,” Rose says. “I am! He’s the Doctor. He’s you, or who you used to be. He stayed.”
“You don’t know how much I wanted to,” the Doctor says.
“I do,” Rose says. “Because he’s told me.”
“I wanted to give you that,” the Doctor says, desperate for her to understand, for Rose to not hate her, knowing she might not deserve it. “Look at me! A thousand years have passed. I would have been mourning you for nine hundred of them. And here you are, alive and well and happy, Rose Tyler in the TARDIS with the Doctor, what more could you want?”
Her voice had been getting louder, without her meaning for it to. She wanted so badly to believe she had done the right thing.
“I wanted you,” Rose says quietly. “I love him, but I never forgot that you were out there, somewhere, alone, after all I had done to find my way back to you. You gave me my happy ending. Don’t you know how much I wanted to give that to you?”
The Doctor had never considered it quite like that.
“Rose Tyler,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
For leaving you, when I said I wouldn’t. For making that choice for you. For all of it.
“Doctor,” Rose says. “I’d like to give you a hug.”
The Doctor is glad for it.
**
“Tell me what it’s like,” the Doctor says. “Human life.”
Her other self looks at her for a long moment, then sits back, his gaze crossing the room to where Rose and Yas giggle together madly at Ryan’s expense while Graham tells them stories. They’ve rigged up a fix that might work to get the pair of them back to where they’re meant to be. No one is in a mad rush to try it.
“It’s… slower,” he says, considering. “Especially while we were waiting for the TARDIS to grow, went a bit bonkers hanging around in one timeline for so long. Rose took me shopping. Turns out humans can’t just wear the same clothes day after day? Bit odd that. Makes getting dressed in the morning a little more complicated. Have to really think.”
He says think with lots of consonants, just the way she remembers the word rolling around in her mouth when she was him. She’s rather fond of this regeneration, when it comes right down to it. Reminds her a lot of herself.
“Feels better now that we can travel again. Going grey, though, as you noticed. Senses aren’t what they used to be. A few creaks and aches. Not sure about all that.”
“We’ve been grey before,” the Doctor says.
“Yeah, but it’s never felt quite like this. One life, that’s all I’ve got now.”
“I would think,” the Doctor says, slowly. “That there is some relief in that.”
The other Doctor breaks into a smile. They understand each other. Of course they do. “There is.”
“Tell me what it’s like with Rose.”
This is the part she shouldn’t ask, that she has no right to know, that she chose to give up. It’s out before she can reconsider.
The other Doctor turns to watch her, his Rose, as she throws her head back and laughs, a sound so full of joy it makes the Doctor’s hearts ache. His smile grows soft, and private.
“It’s quite domestic, really.”
He’s making fun, now. The Doctor crosses her arms.
“It’s like it was before. We travel, we get into trouble, we laugh. Gods, we laugh! It’s everything we wanted, everything we wished we’d cherished when we lost her the first time. Gods, we were so innocent.” He looks at the Doctor, eyes searching her face, like he’s asking if she really wants to know. “It’s better, though. It’s better because I don’t have to hold back. I can kiss her. I can tell her I love her. I don’t have to worry about what comes after her. There’s only her. I’ve never been able to have this. I thought I never would. I should say thank you. Have I ever thanked you?”
The Doctor had closed her eyes against this, a tidal wave of everything she’d hoped to hear and everything that hurts about it. Now she opens them, and sees him looking at her earnestly, all freckles and hair and pinstripes, and taking her hands in his.
“Thank you.”
And the Doctor knows, finally, for certain, that she has done the right thing after all.