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It’s a few weeks before they really get started. After the TARDIS has dematerialized, Rose, the Doctor and Jackie trudge into a town that would really be quite pretty, if it weren’t for the painful memories attached to its beach. They find a small hotel and Jackie barely gets a call in to Pete before falling asleep. Rose and the Doctor aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves and sit on the suite’s tiny loveseat, holding hands and occasionally looking at each other anxiously, like if one let the other out of their sight, they both might just disappear. They barely speak. Rose leans her head on the Doctor’s shoulder and nods off, deep into slumber before he finally musters the courage to start properly saying something. Instead, he carries her to the other bed, pulls off her shoes and tucks her in, lying quietly next to her and watching her breathe.
By morning he’s forgotten what he was going to tell her. Getting back to London is a haze of cabs, zeppelins and private cars, and the Doctor’s the one who passes out when they get to the mansion, slumping over his dinner until Rose takes his hand and guides him upstairs. It’s her turn to put him to bed, in her room, and she curls into his side with her head on his chest, listening to his lonely heartbeat. She wonders if either of them will ever get used to it.
In the morning they talk, lying on their sides, hand entwined between their chests.
"You're still here."
"So are you."
"Yeah. You're still you."
"Always."
He feels like he can never say enough, but he doesn't know how. The rest of that day is quiet, the rest of that week they fight like caged animals, sniping at each other over stupid things like television and laundry.
The Doctor paces the mansion, stalks the grounds, goes out late at night without telling anyone. He's just lying on the grass, as far away from the house as he can get while still staying in the garden, ostensibly staring at the stars, marking the differences in the constellations here in this universe, but he's not really looking at anything. He falls asleep there and creeps in when the sun comes up and glares in his eyes. Everyone's already awake and Rose is frantic, hauling him back onto the verandah to chew him out.
"You just left, you didn't even tell anyone, or leave a note! What did you always tell me about wandering off?! I woke up alone and I was so scared, you have no idea, after everything I've been through-"
He snaps back at her. "And how well did you ever follow that rule? I'm not a child, Rose, I just went out in the bloody backyard! Do you want me to wear a goddamned GPS tracker and keep tabs on me all the time? I don't need to be taken care of, I'm not bloody leaving you and I don't need you to fix me, no matter what he said."
He learns that Rose can slap as well as her mother and when he goes back upstairs after sulking in the kitchen with a calm but stern Pete, the Doctor finds that Rose has taken his meagre belongings out of her room and piled them by the door of a guest bedroom a conspicuous distance down the hall. Jackie drags him out shopping for clothes that day, and Rose is uncomfortably relieved to have him out of the house.
For her part, Rose spends a lot of time in the study pretending to catch up with Torchwood work and trying to add up just how long she spent out in other dimensions with the cannon. Attempting to figure out how old she actually is now, as opposed to what her birth certificate says, leads her to discover that she's just missed the anniversary of Bad Wolf Bay Part One, at least according to the calendar. She emerges for dinner, eyes rimmed in red, telling a curious Tony that it's just allergies. The adults don't believe her. After Tony goes to bed she confesses it to her parents, not realising the Doctor is lingering in the next room, hearing Rose sob over him and him and how could he run out of time, of all things. When she tries to slip out the back door, the Doctor confronts Rose with a too-tight grip on her upper arm.
"I swear to you Rose, I said it that day. I said it to an empty console room and then cursed myself every minute until I could say it properly. Donna heard me say it over and over again when I thought she wasn't there. Don't you dare doubt me on that."
"He left me. He left us. And you have to have known. You're the same man. You have to have known," she hisses. "And yet he still didn't say it, and if you're the same man who the hell am I supposed to believe?" Despite her anger, she never tries to pull her arm from the Doctor's grasp.
"You believe me, Rose Tyler," he spits. "You believe in me, and how much I know you love me. Because I'm the one who told you what I couldn't before. When it came to the devil himself I believed in you, and my love for you, and that's the only thing I have right now. That's been part of me since before I had this face, that's the reason I have this face and why there's two of me, and it has never changed. It's essential to who I am. And I'm still me."
When he lets go and retreats upstairs the stiffness in his fingers tells him about the bruises she'll find the next day. They don't speak for the next fifty-five hours.
It's far too early in the morning on a Sunday. Rose can't sleep and goes out on the verandah to watch the sunrise. She sees the Doctor, back to her, digging in her mother's daffodils while the breeze ruffles his bed-mussed hair. As she gets closer, bare feet growing cold in the dewy grass, she sees the TARDIS coral nestled in a small box with a jumble of kitchen scraps. The Doctor pauses when he hears her kneel next to the coral, his trowel lingering in the dirt for moment. He raises his eyes to her face, but she's staring at the ground, her knees, the box of compost.
"It's got a bunch of nutrients and stuff she'll need," he mumbles, and Rose has never heard the Doctor's voice sound so small.
"Think she'll like yellow?" she asks, feeling just as tiny and finally looking at him.
He smiles a little. "Yeah. And pink," he says, pointing out the nearby tulips. "Pink and yellow for my... our girl." He drops the trowel, his handy spare hand, darkened with soil, taking hers carefully. "With the soil composition and the sunlight here, I think..." He turns his face to where the sky is turning orange and pink against dark blue. "I think she'll do just fine."
Rose brings her other hand to where she's holding the Doctor's, and rubs both thumbs across the backs of his knuckles, watches them smooth away dirt. "She'll be ours?"
"If you want."
"Yeah. Yeah, I want." She looks up at him shyly, and a tear escapes her eye. "It's all I've ever wanted. And all I ever will." She's not really talking about the TARDIS, not entirely, and he knows.
The Doctor can't help but grin, brushing that tear away. Rose knows he’s replacing it with dirt from his fingers but doesn’t care. He lets his hand linger alongside her face. "I'm glad."
"Me too," she says, smiling fully for the first time in ages. "I'm so sorry, Doctor. It's been so long, and I've been so tired. And I think I’ve been spending too much time trying to work out things that aren’t really all that complicated.”
“Like what?”
“Like believing you. If there had been a way for him to be with me, he’d have found it… and maybe this is that way, as strange as it may be. And that he has to love me, because you do and you’re the same man.” She closes her eyes, leans into the Doctor’s hand. “I’ll always love you both. Even if I am still a little mad at him for leaving us.”
“I think I’m still mad at him for that too, though I understand it. I’m sorry Rose, I did know what he was planning… but for once, I got to be the selfish one. I always had to put the universe first, but then I got a chance to keep you for myself and I didn’t think twice about taking it. I know it broke his hearts but you’re right. This is the way he gets to be with you, even though he’ll never know anything about how truly amazing it is.”
“Amazing? Really? After all this?”
“Yes,” he says, quite seriously. “Even after all the fighting. I’m sorry for that too. I’m not getting used to things as quickly as I’d like and it’s hard to admit that. I need to be more patient with myself, and with you. Just promise we won't fight again?"
He looks so hopeful that Rose has to stifle a laugh. "I can't promise that, Doctor, couples row. It happens. But I will promise that we won't spend two days not talking because of an argument. Deal?"
"Deal." The Doctor grins again and strokes her cheek. "Wanna help me plant our baby TARDIS?"
"Absolutely."
He slips his fingers into her hair and leans close, kissing her gently. She smiles against his lips as he murmurs, "Fantastic."