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“They’re waiting for you,” the mirror-woman said. Yaz glanced around the room, looking for someone to show up. She only saw Hanne’s dad, the mirror-woman, and the Doctor and Graham; no one was waiting.
“Who is?” the Doctor asked, stepping forward.
“They came just when you did.” The mirror-woman’s lips curved into a little smile. “Go on and look.” She stepped back and gestured at a sliding door.
The Doctor led the way outside with narrowed eyes, her sonic screwdriver raised. Yaz was close on her heels, and Graham a few steps after. Yaz didn’t know who she expected to find-- there was no one she was missing in the same way that Hanne’s dad had missed his wife.
There was white fabric hanging on a clothesline, floating in the breeze, and beyond that Yaz could just about make out the outlines of two people. One of them was Ryan’s nan; Yaz had known Grace long enough to be able to recognize her. But, as Graham stepped past her, Yaz’s gaze shifted to the other figure. She didn’t recognize the silhouette, but the Doctor had gone completely still, her sonic shaking in her hand.
“Who is it?” Yaz asked.
The Doctor didn’t answer.
A gust of wind blew the white fabric to the side, and Yaz saw a smile stretched across the face of a blonde woman. The woman took a few steps forward, looking the Doctor up and down.
“It’s really you,” she said. “I didn’t believe them when they said you were coming. But you did.”
“No,” the Doctor said. Her sonic was still raised, keeping the woman at arms length. “She’s not dead. Trine and Grace, they’re dead. But she is so alive.”
“Come on, Doctor,” the woman said. “You know it’s me.”
“How do you know I’m me ?” the Doctor countered. Yaz remembered the Doctor talking about who she had been before she had become who she was now. A grouchy old man, someone with a floppy boyish energy, the one with the really nice hair. Yaz wondered which the Doctor had been for this woman.
“Oh, come on, Doctor,” the woman said. “With that fashion sense? Could only ever be you.”
Yaz had to suppress a laugh at that one. She knew something was off about this world, and she knew that this woman couldn’t actually be who she looked like, whoever that was, but-- she was right about the Doctor.
“Oi, what’s wrong with my outfit?” the Doctor asked, looking down at her coat. “And more importantly, who are you, and what are you doing here?”
“Doctor, it’s me,” the woman said. “Rose.”
“Rose Tyler isn’t dead,” the Doctor said. “It’s 2018. She’s still in her thirties. Too young to be here.”
The woman’s face fell.
“I am,” she said. “I died in the other universe. I was only there a year, in the end. I don’t know how I wound up here.”
“No,” the Doctor said. “Rose Tyler isn’t dead, and you’re not Rose Tyler. She’s locked away in a parallel universe. Not only that, but you could tell me anything about her and I’d believe it because I have no way of fact-checking.”
The woman took two steps closer, sidestepping the Doctor’s outstretched arm. She reached a hand up to the Doctor’s shoulder, smoothing out her collar. The Doctor lowered her sonic in defeat, or perhaps confusion, or perhaps-- something else.
“You missed me, Doctor,” the woman said. "You must have, yeah?"
Yaz stepped back. This was clearly a private moment, and yet-- she didn’t know where else to look. Graham was reuniting with Grace, and Yaz didn’t have anyone here for her. Besides, she trusted the Doctor to know whether or not this woman was really who the Doctor thought she was, and therefore she was looking to the Doctor for-- a verdict, almost.
“I missed you,” the Doctor repeated, looking into the other woman’s eyes. “It’s been a thousand years, Rose.” Her voice was barely louder than a breath. “I haven’t seen you for a thousand years.”
“I’m here now,” the woman said, and she leaned in and kissed the Doctor softly, slowly. Yaz looked away for a moment. When she dared a glance back, the woman had pulled back, and the Doctor’s expression was completely open and unguarded.
Yaz could see the moment when her guard went back up.
The Doctor stepped back. Her face had gone stony, her eyes sharp as diamond. She raised her screwdriver again.
“No,” she said. “How dare you? How dare you use her face?” She advanced on the woman, her voice getting lower and lower. “If you really knew me, if you were really Rose Tyler, you’d know that nothing, nothing makes me angrier than the the ones I love being used against me. This is an insult to Rose Tyler, and it’s an insult to me.” She glanced at Graham, still with Grace, and Yaz, still watching everything unfold. “Graham, Yaz, we’re going.”
She turned and marched away. The woman who might be Rose ran after her, leaving Yaz to follow in complete confusion.
It wasn’t really Rose Tyler, and it wasn’t really Ryan’s nan, and it wasn’t really Hanne’s mum, either. It was some sort of Time Lord fairy tale thing that Yaz didn’t quite understand. She just knew that everyone but her had seen someone they had lost, had had a moment of hope, and had that hope taken away.
Yaz never wanted to be the person who took gave the Doctor hope only to take it away. The Doctor was a dangerous kind of still all the way up until Yaz escaped (she didn’t see what happened after that).
The next she heard, the other universe had been destroyed.
The Doctor didn’t say how. She didn’t say much at all, actually. She just gripped her sonic screwdriver tightly in one hand and started walking down to the lake, and Yaz, Ryan, and Graham followed, exchanging concerned glances.
Later, once they were all back in the TARDIS, and once Ryan and Graham had gone off to the kitchen, Yaz came up behind the Doctor. She was no longer still; now, she seemed soft, almost malleable. She was standing with her head ducked to stare with glassy eyes at the TARDIS console, her hands on either side of some sort of montage of the woman who must have been Rose Tyler, smiling and laughing and often pressed close by the side of an unfamiliar man in a pinstriped suit, who Yaz realized must have been another version the Doctor.
“Who was she?” Yaz asked.
“An old friend,” the Doctor said.
“Seemed a bit more than a friend,” Yaz said.
“I don’t usually fall in love with humans,” the Doctor murmured, her eyes fixed on a picture of Rose, arm outstretched, laughing with the Doctor’s hand in hers.
“But you fell in love with her,” Yaz finished, looking at the picture.
The Doctor nodded.
“She had so much joy in her,” she said. “So much… so much love. She was always trying to save people. I think she saved me.”
“What happened to her?” Yaz asked.
“Parallel universe,” the Doctor said. “I can’t be with humans for very long, even when I do fall in love. She lives in a parallel universe with a human version of me-- which is a long story I might tell you sometime-- and I live here, in this universe, alone.”
Yaz had never heard bitterness from the Doctor before, but she thought she might be hearing it now.
“But she isn’t actually dead,” she said, “right?”
“She might be,” the Doctor said. “For all I know. I’m never going to know what happened to her.”
The Doctor took her hands off the TARDIS console and turned to face Yaz with big sad eyes.
“I miss her,” she said. “I miss everyone I’ve traveled with. You lot-- humans-- you live so quickly . I can’t do that. I have to keep going when you’re all gone.”
“So why travel with us?” Yaz asked, glancing back to the montage, which was now showing Rose in a poodle skirt, posing in front of the TARDIS doors. “Why bother, when you’re just going to hurt?”
“It’s better than the alternative,” the Doctor said. She turned back to the console and flicked a switch. The montage disappeared.
“Which is--?”
“Getting old,” the Doctor said. “Hardening. Cutting myself off. I’d much rather feel. Humans bring that out of me. Rose was especially good at it.”
“I wish I could’ve met her for real,” Yaz said.
“Oh, you’d’ve loved her,” the Doctor said, the light returning to her eyes. It was like she’d flipped a switch. “You’re both brilliant. Now, come on, where do you want to go tomorrow? Mars? Batlon Onordia? Nix? The clouds on Nix are purple, you know. The sunsets are quite literally brilliant.”
“You know me,” Yaz said. “I’m up for anything.”
“Brilliant,” the Doctor repeated. “Then how about a cup of tea?”
Yaz followed the Doctor to the kitchen, where Ryan and Graham were already sitting at the little table and sipping from mugs of tea. As the Doctor flitted around the kitchen, pulling down tea, milk, sugar, and probably a few other things, Yaz thought about what it would be like if the Doctor didn’t travel with people-- just one woman, alone, in this giant TARDIS.
Yeah. The Doctor needed some humans around.
Yaz wished she could have met this Rose Tyler, though.