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The Doctor stared at the trapdoor in the floor that he'd just come in through. It sat there, closed. He had to admit it was a rather wonderful piece of woodwork, but that was just the problem. Despite being on a planet far advanced past 21st century Earth, the trapdoor and it's locking mechanism was entirely wooden.
Wooden, and automatic.
It was truly brilliant, he had to give it to the mechanism. But, there weren't any windows in the attic he'd gone snooping in. Plus, and this was the bit that really got to him, he was alone. He hadn't yet gone looking around for a companion, and well it would probably be some time before he got around to that.
The Doctor did the one thing he could in his rather annoying situation. He swore in his native language, then again, and just for good measure followed it up with some creative curses in alien languages he didn't often get to use.
Swearing, as it turned out, did not get you out of a locked attic. What it did do however, was wake the sleeping sentry in the dark of the attic.
Vaguely the Doctor wondered if a burst of regeneration energy would be enough to get himself out of the attic. He rather hoped it wouldn't come to that though, he was rather attached to the body he'd taken on only recently. He wasn't in any mood to run through his regenerations, whether there was any form of limit on them or not.
He fished the sonic out his pocket and flipped it open, he hoped to, well, the only thing he believed in, that his sonic would be enough to disarm the robot he wasn't familiar with.
Slowly the robot backed the Doctor up, each step the robot took towards him, the Doctor took a step back. As focused on the robot as he was the Doctor nearly tripped over a small box near a pile of things haphazardly tossed up into the attic for storage.
He never should have gone to the house, the Doctor lamented. He was chasing loose threads again. Bad Wolf Cottage, a misnomer of a name it wasn't anything like a cottage three stories tall, and multiple large attics. It had been mysteriously abandoned some time ago and he just couldn't resist the mystery of the name.
Sometimes he really was just a madman in a box chasing the wolf. This time it might have been just the thing to kick start an early regeneration. The Doctor took a step back when the robot took another step forward.
His steps had been larger than the robots, though not by much, still the robot was on the other side of the trap door. All the while the Doctor had ended up with his back pressing against the wall. The cold of the brick wall supporting the roof starting to seep through his shirt.
As the robot took another step towards him, it's arm raising ready to attack, the latch in the trap door faintly clicked.
The Doctor refused to hope for rescue, that was firmly what he did. Or his companion, but he was currently companion-less, and that was probably for the best.
He heard the tell-tale whirring of a robotic gun, and with no where to go all the Doctor could do was close his eyes and look away.
A coward's death really, not looking incoming death in the face.
Instead of any of the expected, there was a loud bang of wood on metal followed by a crash.
"Run," a voice said. And the Doctor had to be dead. He'd only ever hear that voice again if he was dead. He must have run out of regenerations, he thought dimly.
Still, even as his acceptance of apparent death settled in, he ran.
"Do you know what's going on?" the Doctor asked.
"A bit yeah," she answered vaguely. And the Doctor's hearts lurched, because it had to be her. It made sense didn't it? Bad Wolf cottage, Rose Tyler, they went hand in hand.
But surely he was dead, because why else would he be in the same universe as her? His final thoughts had been of her, to her. A hope that somehow, some way, she'd save him or something would at least. And there she was, knocking down a robot with an attic trapdoor and tugging him down a ladder and through winding hallways.
There was no way it could be real. And she was so much like him.
"Do you have a plan?" he asked. Ahead of him she shrugged slightly.
"Currently, get you out of here," she said, stopping and turning to him. "And look mate, if you aren't in the mood for someone to ruin your abandoned house shenanigans maybe you shouldn't have picked the house that's being used for an invasion," she told him.
"An invasion?" the Doctor asked.
"Aliens, don't worry I've got it sorted, and I have more experience than you'd expect," she said. He wondered again if he were dead. Then her words settled over him, and he looked her over. If this was her, and by every god that existed in every religion in the universe he hoped it was, she still looked young. Still looked exactly as she had when they'd last met. Maybe he really was dead.
He swallowed down his fears, and let hope bloom instead. This, it was mad! There wasn't anyway this could be happening. But, her eyes.
"Rose?" he choked out. She froze. It was awful timing, to be frozen in the hallway of an invasion base. Her eyes met his, properly.
An almost honeyed brown, swirled through with gold. Gold like the time vortex, like time itself. Gold like Bad Wolf. And they were, oh they were so so old. He could see it, her eyes held hundreds of years of memories and pain, while her face only showed her first twenty years of life.
"Rose," he choked out for a second time, this time not a question. This time filled with a certainty that came from no where in particular, just belief in her. Tears threatened to fall from her eyes, a reflection of his own tears threatening to fall.
Across from him, in a hallway of Bad Wolf cottage, as a robot tried to trudge down from the attic, Rose laughed. Not her normal laugh, not the laugh his hearts had been aching to hear for thousands of years, aching to hear since he lost her. But a laugh of exasperation, of shock.
"Of course it's you Doctor," she said, and that was all the talking they did as Rose continued to drag him out of the so-called cottage. He was dragged through winding halls, happy to follow Rose. He didn't care where she took him, the Doctor would let Rose Tyler lead him out to the edge of the universe. She could take them to what counted as hell, could take them to their demise, and the Doctor would still follow her like the lost puppy he sometimes felt without her.
Together they stood outside Bad Wolf Cottage, staring up at it as if it held the answers to how to solve the invasion.
"We could blow it up," he suggested. The familiarity of their reunion, despite how different it truly was, had not been lost on him. Beside him, Rose let out a laugh. An actual laugh, the sound he'd missed for so long. A laugh that filled the hole in his chest, and echoed through him, forcing a grin onto his own face.
"We could," Rose agreed. "Doesn't feel right though," she added.
"No?" he asked. Rose shook her head.
"No," she confirmed.
"No, Bad Wolf Cottage should stay standing," the Doctor agreed. Rose laughed again, but nodded.
"Come on, take me to the TARDIS and we can find a less violent way to fix this," she said. And the Doctor would have been a fool to not do as she asked. Rose Tyler in the TARDIS, by his side, just as it should be. Yes, that was the perfect thing to do. He'd ask her about, well, everything when they'd fixed the invasion. They could sit down and talk about how she was here, why she was here, everything he'd missed. And he'd tell her everything she'd missed as he went on without her.
Part of the Doctor desperately wanted to put off solving the invasion just to talk with Rose. Just to catch up with her. But he knew he couldn't. Knew that if he even stopped to ask one question, he might not stop asking, might not stop until he knew everything about her from their time apart.
So instead the Doctor led Rose to the TARDIS and asked only about the invasion. Everything else could wait, he could wait to know more about Rose. After all, he'd waited thousands of years what was a few more hours of waiting? Especially with Rose actually at his side.