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For days after her arrival in Pete’s World, Rose can’t sleep.
When she closes her eyes, she finds herself falling, further and further, everything but the Doctor’s horrified expression a blur.
Much like the rest of the house, the guest room Pete has given her is modern and impersonal, and the stark, white surfaces that surround her serve as constant reminders that she is far away from home.
Far away from the Doctor.
She misses feeling warm and safe, even in the midst of running for her life, long, reassuring fingers wrapped around her own. She misses the coral hues of the TARDIS, the soft sounds of the ship, the messy comforts of her room, the fraying threads of the jumpseat where she spent hours watching the Doctor work.
Most of all, she misses their endless nights in the library.
She remembers mentions of one from the night she and the Doctor pretended to cater Parallel Jackie’s birthday party and goes off to find it, hoping it isn’t all pristine furniture and uncracked spines. And it isn’t.
The library had obviously gone untouched by whatever decorator had sterilized the rest of the mansion; the room is filled with leather armchairs, and the shelves that line the walls are filled with more creased paperbacks than unread hardbacks.
Though not a great reader herself, Rose finds comfort in the room. She runs her fingers along the worn leather and allows her thoughts to stray to the overstuffed sofas she would curl up in on the endless nights where the Doctor would prattle on about TARDIS repairs or a special kind of jam that can only to be found in a three hundred and seventy-fifth century village on the coast of New Newfoundland or whatever happened to pass through his mind, neither much caring so long as they were together.
She begins visiting the library in the middle of the night, and after Pete finds her asleep in the oldest of the armchairs on more than one morning, he starts having the fireplace lit before going to sleep. He never comments on her visits, but her interest in the room creates a bond between them, and soon he starts leaving books he thinks she may like out on the coffee table. Comfy blankets are laid out on the armrests, and cold, sleepless nights become increasingly rare.
As sleep reclaims her, however, so do the nightmares.
Night after night, she fights Cybermen and Daleks and the Sycorax in never ending battles, and she survives. She falls and falls and lands on her feet, not a scratch or a bruise to be found.
Yet she’s forced to watch the Doctor follow his severed hand off an airborne ship and get his brain sucked out, her heart in her throat.
She thinks she hides her pain well at first, forcing smiles over tea and toast, but the bags under her eyes darken and she’s sullen and more withdrawn than she’s ever been. Her mum wraps her in her arms and tries to sympathize, muttering comforting words into her hair, even as Rose refuses to cry.
“Oh, sweetheart. I was the same way after I lost your dad, you know.”
“Mum…"
“Thought life couldn’t possibly go on without him, to be honest.”
Rose listens, fidgeting as she stares into her tea.
“But it did. It got better, sweetheart. I know you don’t believe me, but it does.”
Rose takes a shaky breath. “Mum, it hurts.”
“I know, sweetheart.” Her mum places a comforting hand on her back. “I know you love that daft alien and it feels like the world is being ripped apart, but I promise you that it’ll get better.”
Rose is thankful, but then morning after morning, the comfort fades and the stories get more upbeat, ending on more forceful reminders that the only way for life to get better is for her to move on.
She knows her mum means best, but she has no intention to accept her lot. Not yet.
Pete is more sympathetic to her cause, his own loss fresher than her mum’s. Evenings he gets home from Vitex or Torchwood early enough, he joins her in the library, a tumbler of Scotch in one hand and a casual book in the other. Sometimes he tells her about his favorite books and, others, they discuss differences between their universes.
On one particularly tiring evening, he shows her albums of his life before her first visit to Pete’s World. Before the Cybermen. Slowly he opens up, and the two begin to share stories of their struggles to come to terms with their new reality.
Rose knows he’s not the father she’d met and momentarily saved in her own universe, but this Pete has experienced more loss and come in contact with things that few people she’s met understand, and the two get along effortlessly.
Eventually, she shares her desires to go home and puts her daydreams into words. Pete is impressed with her ideas, and though he knows as well as she does that the walls between dimensions are sealed shut, he knows better than to believe in absolutes and is convinced that they’re far more attainable than she believes.
The next day he comes home with a heavy packet of papers and a badge.
“How would you feel about working with me?"
Rose is perplexed, thoughts of superficial executives and health beverages dancing in front of her. “At Vitex?”
“At Torchwood.”
Rose frowns. “I don’t think I’m qualified for that. I -“
“You’re more qualified than anyone else who works there.”
“I don’t even have my A Levels, Pete.”
“Maybe not, but you have more first hand knowledge than anyone else. We may have faced the Cybermen, but you’ve come face to face with more species than we even knew were in existence. You’ve spent years of your life with the Doctor. I have no doubt that you’d bring invaluable knowledge to the table.”
Rose slowly shakes her head. “I don’t think I could work for Torchwood. They hate the Doctor. They hate me… The institution was created out of hate for us. I –“
“That was your Torchwood, Rose. The Torchwood here was created because Sir Robert MacLeish left his property and his fortune to his son on condition that he would use them for the promotion of science and astronomy. It ultimately shares the purpose of defending the earth, but it doesn’t have the sinister past of your universe and it certainly doesn’t have any negative views about you or the Doctor.”
Rose breathes deeply. “The Doctor doesn’t exist here.”
“No.” Pete sighs, sitting down beside her. “Either way, Rose, I’m in charge of Torchwood here. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, or in any circumstance where he might appear, to the Doctor. You’d have your own team and you could get to work on all of your ideas, consulting with the rest of us when necessary. We could arrange for you to have a crash course in physics, astronomy, or whatever else you might want, if you want.”
Rose bites down on her lower lip, the weight of the offer washing over her. Hesitation turns to excitement as the possibilities run through her mind, and she slowly nods. “Alright then. Suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try.”
“Really?” Pete relaxes his posture, visibly relieved.
Rose smiles and reaches for the packet of papers Pete brought home with him. “Really.”
Weeks after she starts working at Torchwood, Rose hears the Doctor calling her in her sleep in a voice so clear, so realistic that she can almost feel his breath in her ear. She wakes and they drive all the way to Norway, optimism and nervous joy doing away with the length of the journey.
But then the reunion she’d anticipated turns out to be a projection on an empty beach. No touch. No hope. Nothing but a hurried goodbye and fresh heartbreak; the separation she’d hoped was temporary a new permanence far harsher than the glacial winds lapping at her hair.
Sleep evades her yet again when she returns to London, and an eternity of sleepless nights spent staring at the pink and flowery prints of her newly redecorated room stretches out before her. She spends that night tossing and turning, and finally, she decides to move out.
She finds a flat in Central London, a cosy one bedroom tucked away near the park. It isn’t in an area she would have considered in her earlier life, even if it hadn’t been exorbitantly out of her price range.
It’s a bit posh, and she knows it, hears her mum’s sing-song voice telling her off every time she sticks her key in the door, but she wants to inhabit a part of the city that’s foreign to her. She wants the tiny sense of adventure, and the distance from Canary Wharf and the modern buildings around it helps her to forget the events that brought her here in the first place.
As time passes, the implied permanence behind the Doctor’s words on the beach haunts her, and the finality of the you can’t follows her wherever she goes as she turns it over and over in her head. It isn’t until her sadness turns to anger that she decides that no one - not even the Doctor - can tell her what she can and cannot do. After all, the Doctor’s been wrong before, and she knows that for all of his brilliance, he sometimes misses the tiny solutions hidden behind big, impossible pictures.
She channels her heartbreak into determination and goes from spending nights in the library to nights at her desk, writing down ideas and working through theories. Eventually Pete pulls her away and refuses to give her access to the building beyond working hours.
Her project gets put in the hands of the theoretical physicists she consults with on a weekly basis… and there’s little she can do in the meantime.
So until then, she does what she can. She wards off alien threats, surveys timelines, and studies physics. She spends time with her family, delighting in her new little brother and getting to know the man she’s come to see as her father. And she begins to nest. In her own way.
Her new corner of the city is older than any she’s lived in before. Ruins and landmarks that she had never even heard of are left in tact in this universe and she spends hours exploring a city she thought she knew.
Faint, old building smells remind her of her trips back in time, and calm washes over her whenever she roams the streets around the park, her mind finally clearing of the constant, hectic chatter at home and at work.
Cafés and bookshops and markets litter the area, and she begins to spend her weekends gathering things for her flat.
Pete had sent her favourite leather armchair from the library with her when she’d moved out, along with its twin, insisting that she should have a piece of home with her when she starts anew. He knows what the chairs mean to her, the other home they evoke, and they prove to be a good starting place as she sets about filling her rooms with pieces that remind her of the TARDIS.
She paints the walls in warm colours and covers the bedroom with honeycomb wallpaper. She finds Turkish carpets in rare blue patterns like those they’d seen in the faraway bazaar the day she’d found the bazoolium for her mum. Mickey builds her a bookcase that covers a wall of her surprisingly large living room, and she begins to spend her Sunday afternoons scouring second hand bookshops.
On a rainy afternoon early in March, she finds a hardcover set of Dickens’ complete works.
She’d forgotten her umbrella at the restaurant her mum had picked out for their weekly brunch, and she ducks into the first shop she finds. It's surprisingly deserted for a weekend, and she can detect the faint smell of dust and wet umbrellas. Evidently decades old, books line every surface of the shop, from the expected shelves to stacks on the edges of a slightly warped staircase.
Rose smiles despite the sudden heaviness in the pit of her stomach. The shops looks as if it could have been a corner of the TARDIS library, all love and wear and no pretense. She squeezes her eyes shut, half expecting to see the Doctor's carefully coiffed but unruly mop of hair when she climbs the staircase to the second floor, and takes a deep breath as she imagines what it would be like if he were to pop up from behind the stacks and start rambling about whatever book he is holding.
She trails her hand along the bannister and catches her finger on a splinter of wood. She'll have to carefully extract it later, but the slight sting pulls her from her reverie and she takes in the upper floor. It's much like the entrance, but a frayed carpet sits in the center of the room and various cushions are strewn in front of a fireplace.
The shop has more character than any she's visited so far and she quickly gets lost in the stacks, looking for familiar names. She finds a volume of Brontë she hasn't read before, and the promise of lost love and endless yearning pushes her to reach for it.
She reads in front of the fireplace for a bit, getting lost in words and empathy. Only when her leg begins to cramp does she get up and return to roaming amongst the shelves.
A glass case that she'd only seen out of the corner of her eye catches her attention after an elderly man she assumes to be the shopkeeper goes up to it with a key and begins to carry piles of heavy leather bound books towards it.
"Can I give you a hand with those?"
"Oh! Thank you, dear." He takes a deep breath, allowing Rose to take several of the volumes from his arms. "Careful though. New stock of Dickens. They aren't first editions or anything, but we only see complete sets the likes of these every decade or so."
Rose gulps as she runs her finger over the embossed covers, handing the books over one by one. "Have these been spoken for?"
"Oh, no. I don't like to advertise finds like these. Any other shopkeeper would, and they'd be much better off for it, but I prefer to leave these matters to chance... let the casual book lover in amongst the collectors. Seems more fair that way." He winks before going to get the rest of the books.
Before she has time to make up her mind, the shopkeeper is back and she's bargaining for the entire collection. It costs a ridiculous amount and her stomach clenches as she hands over her credit card minutes later, still unused to being able to spend such large sums in one go, but she pictures the Doctor’s excitement over the fact that the set includes two entire novels that don’t exist in their universe and blinks away her doubts.
Thunder cracks as the shopkeeper packages the books and arranges for them to be delivered later in the day. He gives her a soft smile as she zips up her jacket, and before she has a chance to turn towards the door, he offers her a cuppa and a story about an encounter his grandfather had had with Dickens as a boy. Rose wonders what he'd do if she were to tell him of her own encounter, smiling into her cup.
Happy with her finds and the new friend she's made, Rose hurries back to her flat, not minding the cold that settles into her bones.
When she gets home, she clears an entire shelf for the Dickens collection.
Her bookcases are already relatively full with her other finds: paperbacks of contemporary novels she reads on the tube in an attempt to reconnect with the world, knickknacks that remind her of past trips, travels books she isn’t ready to use, and worn hardbacks of old favourites she read with the Doctor.
She wants to call her dad and tell him about the find, but she suspects her mum will be within earshot and begin to fret over her difficulties moving on, and so she keeps the purchase to herself.
The buzzer goes off just as she finds the pair of coral bookends she'd purchased from a quirky shop in Notting Hill weeks ago, and she runs to sign for the delivery.
She takes her time organizing the new books, imagining her first Doctor going on about the importance of chronological order in a non linear world, of picking up on temporal irregularities that might endanger the established order of the world. She chuckles, knowing he wasn't necessarily speaking about the order of books on a shelf, but she organizes them chronologically anyway, delighting at the pair of unread books at the end of the row.
She doesn’t read Dickens often, but when she does, she makes a production of it. Drapes drawn, she makes a pot of tea and eventually snuggles into a huge blanket her mum had given to her when she'd moved into the flat. The words envelope her along with the warmth of her fabricated cocoon, and the texts give way to memories.
She cherishes the collection, reading over old favorites and remembering the afternoons her first Doctor spent reading to her after their trip to Cardiff, the nights she and her second spent curled up on the sofa, passing a fifty-first century edition of The Mystery of Edwin Drood between them, trading kisses and theories of how the story could have been resolved with the help of little blue ghosts.
Dickens lived a decade longer in this universe, but there are no gaseous creatures in his later novels, no alien encounters to speak of. No Doctor.
Slowly, she makes her way through the new books, losing herself in the vivid stories and trying to memorize as much as she can.
She knows she won't be able to take the books with her when the cannon eventually begins to works, knows how silly it would be to stick them in the transdimensional pockets she'd salvaged from the clothes she'd been wearing the day of the battle, but she also knows the Doctor would be disappointed if she couldn't at least tell him about the parallel stories.
She can picture his pout, his protruding bottom lip and a "but Roseee" on his breath. She smiles at the thought and exercises the memorization skills she's developed at Torchwood, visualizing the text as she takes in the stories.
Months go by. The hours of experiments pay off, and the dimension cannon becomes a reality. Yet the wall between the worlds remains sealed, and Rose spends more time watching timelines and fighting local alien threats than traveling off-world. Still, her ideas are fresh and her projects bring much needed ethical change to Torchwood, and Rose swiftly rises through the ranks.
Pete reluctantly grants her weekend access, and soon she’s only taking hours off on the weekends to play with a newly talkative Tony and catch up with her mother. Her flat stops being a project and turns into a haven where she can sleep.
Dust slowly gathers on the copy of A Christmas Carol that sits next to a framed, pixelated photo of her and the Doctor she’d salvaged from her phone and a blank piece of psychic paper on her bedside table.
It isn’t until the stars begin to go out and the barriers begin to break; until years of frustration turn into months of gruelling trips, and she’s faced with endless worlds and more death and destruction than she’s ever cared to see; until she comes home with an impossible third Doctor that she picks up where she left off.
They decide to go straight to the flat after Norway.
Her mum insists that they come home with her and Pete, going so far as to say that the Doctor would be better off, feel more at home with all of them together. She knows she’s grasping at straws, and Rose knows she’s just dealing with everything she’s seen in the best way that she can, but Rose is exhausted and confused, and the Doctor’s surprisingly withdrawn, and they need to be alone.
They make promises of Sunday dinner and vow that they won’t leave London, let alone the country or the planet without letting them know, and they withdraw to reacquaint themselves with each other.
They talk, they argue, the Doctor patiently listens, and they slowly establish what they are, what they want, and who they’ve been for the past few years. Rose has the blackout drapes in the bedroom drawn, a dull, persistent migraine throbbing in her head. It’s unlike any she’s experienced since the early dimension hopping days, but the Doctor threads his fingers through her hair and massages the pain away.
Hours go by and they barely leave the bedroom. Months of relentless trips catch up with Rose, and while the meta-crisis doesn’t seem to be as difficult as his last regeneration, the Doctor is still drained and succumbs to his new, human desires for sleep. Where he’ll do so is never a question, and together they crawl into the big bed Rose always knew she’d be thankful for getting. Limbs tangle together, and they resume their old positions. Big spoon, little spoon, Rose still fits perfectly into the Doctor’s arms and falls asleep faster than she has in ages.
Newly part-human though he may be, the Doctor is just as restless as ever, and Rose awakes to the soft sound of rustling. Sleep pulls at her, but the other side of the bed is empty and cold, and she pads out of the room. Barefoot, she shivers and mentally notes that they’ll have to buy more carpets now that they’re staying put, biting her lip at how she thinks she knows the Doctor will react.
He’s sitting in one of the armchairs when she steps into the sitting room, leafing through a book. He’s turned away from her, and she can see the slight ripples in his back as he turns the pages, the rumpled hair at his nape, begging to be touched.
A volume’s missing from the end of the Dickens shelf, and she has no trouble guessing what it is that has him so enraptured.
“Doctor?”
Before she knows what’s happening, her eyes are burning and she lets out a shaky breath as she walks over. The Doctor’s head snaps up, trance broken as he takes in her appearance. He shoots her a quizzical look, and she shakes her head, only then realizing that a few stray tears have made their way down her face.
“Whatcha reading?”
The Doctor holds up the first of the New Dickens, a soft smile on his face. “I knew my tastes were rubbing off on you.”
“I bought those books for you.” She bites down on her lip.
The Doctor quirks a brow, and his lips bloom into a grin she hasn’t seen nearly enough of in the past few years.
“They kept me sane after I first got here.” She smiles softly, trying to keep her voice steady, and leans against the opposite armchair. “Kept imagining how you’d react to knowing that all these books existed in this universe. I read them all… knew I’d have to at least tell you about them if I couldn’t take them with me.” She looks down, fiddling with the sleeve of her pullover. “I never thought you’d be here to read them for yourself.”
“Come here.” He holds out a hand, wiggling his fingers in a way that’s far more playful than the expression on his face. His eyes have darkened, and she can’t tell if they’ve glazed over along with hers.
She takes his hand, stilling his fingers and burrowing into the spot he’s scooted over to make for her. The feel of him, pressed up beside her, warm and solid against her chest, his arm soothingly wrapped around her, is too much, and the dam she’s been holding in place for years finally breaks.
Shuddering, she presses her face into his neck, relishing the tightening of his embrace, and threads her fingers through his hair.
The tears come slowly, little drops trailing down her cheek. They feel silly at first, an extravagance after all this time, but then the Doctor presses a kiss to the top of her head, and they come on faster. Out of frustration. Out of relief.
“Rose?”
His voice is barely above a whisper, but his breath is so close to her ear that it echoes through her entire body, instantly calming her. She breathes in, her pulse slowing down as the Doctor nuzzles her hair.
“Sorry. ‘s just… this is so different than I thought it would be.”
The Doctor’s arms tense around her and she hears, feels him take a sharp intake of breath. “Ah.”
“No. Doctor, no.” She twists slightly and reaches up to cup his cheek. “It’s different, yeah, but it’s also more than I could have hoped for.”
He meets her gaze tentatively. “Yeah?”
She bites down on her lip, heart clenching at his hesitation. “Yeah. I have you, don’t I? And I get to see Mum and Dad and Tony. It’s the best of both worlds, really. This way, we can face Mum’s Sunday roasts together.”
His lips threaten to quirk back into a grin at that, but his eyes darken, and the disquiet is still in his voice when he speaks. “But you’re still stuck here. No TARDIS. No Time Lord. No adventures.”
“Oi, none of that. I’m pretty sure we’ll run into adventure no matter what we do, and anyway, we have the TARDIS coral. And better with two, yeah?” She nudges him slightly, hoping he’ll smile back at her.
He does. “Always.” He reaches for the hand she’s let drop to her lap and laces their fingers together. “I meant it, you know. On the beach.”
She smiles, eyes locked on their intertwined hands. “I know.”
“I have for a long time.” He traces an intricate circular pattern against her wrist, once, twice, and Rose’s breath hitches at the realization.
“You’ve done that hundreds of times before. You always -”
She lets her eyes travel back to his and finds them darker, more serious than they were a minute earlier.
He nods. “It’s Gallifreyan. It doesn’t exactly mean the same thing. It implies more.” He smiles softly. “Deeper, eternal love.”
Her eyes burn, threatening to overflow again, as she disentangles their hands and holds his in hers, palm side up. Without breaking eye contact, she traces the same pattern on his wrist and brings the spot to her lips, pressing softly.
The Doctor’s pulse quickens beneath her fingers, and his voice comes out gravelly when he speaks. “Do you mean it?”
“Of course I mean it. I traveled through dimensions to find you again, didn’t I?”
“I thought that was to stop the stars from going out.”
She nudges him, lips stretching into a close-mouthed grin. She knows he’s teasing, but the insecurity is still there and all she wants is for him to relax and feel as secure as she finally does.
Reaching back up, she brushes her fingers along his jaw and moves to bring his face closer. “I would have found a way even if they weren’t. I don’t take forever lightly.”
The arm he still has wrapped around her waist tightens at that, and he presses their foreheads together. “My Rose.”
She closes her eyes, relishing the moment, and leans in to press her lips to his. She lingers only long enough for him to reciprocate, the short intensity of the kiss saying everything that needs to be said. They stay close, wordlessly breathing the other in.
She nuzzles his nose before settling back into his side, and rests her head against his shoulder. “Read to me? Like you used to?”
He smiles, and reaches for the book he’d put aside. “From the beginning?”
She sighs happily. “Wherever you left off is fine.”
He rests his cheek against the top of her head and begins to read. She knows the story in and out at this point, but the Doctor takes his time, giving more life, more energy to the text than she’d thought possible and she basks in the rich cadence of his voice.
He pauses from time to time, shifting to reach for a blanket, to press kiss after kiss to her hair, cheeks, hands. The soothing sound of his voice makes her eyes grow heavy, and she sinks deeper into his embrace, letting herself drift off to sleep, finally home.