Chapter Text
“Is something wrong?”
It was midafternoon on a sunny Friday, the first one after the New Year. They were supposed to have been helping pack up the house, now that the move to France had been unanimously, if not enthusiastically, agreed upon. Somehow, amid an energetic retelling of a Dalek battle, the Doctor collided with a stack of packed boxes and sent the contents tumbling across the floor. They would probably still have been packing if Rose hadn’t laughed just a little too hard. As it was, Donna sent them out like children, told them to get some fresh air and to ‘stay out of trouble’. Rose strongly suspected the last comment was not aimed at her.
Sales signs hung in every shop front, and the Christmas lights were still on, swinging in the breeze. Inside the coffee shop there was a hum of noise, punctuated by the harsh gushes of steam from behind the counter where a young server battled with an overzealous frother. The double-fronted building with enormous windows looked out onto a busy London street. Shoppers passed by in droves, arms laden with the best holiday deals they could find. Across the road, double-decker buses squealed to a halt before a glass-and-metal monstrosity, incongruous with the Edwardian stone buildings surrounding it.
There was something familiar about the locale. A sense that he’d been there before. And, he supposed, he probably had, at one time or another. He had been everywhere in this city in his long life. Sometimes it was hard to keep it all in the right order. Was this a place he had been 100 years ago? Or a place he would visit 100 years from now? His thousand-yard stare, brown eyes lost in a time no-one else remembered, gazed across the street and through the eons of his existence.
“Doctor?”
Rose Noble leant across the table between them and snagged his coat sleeve, concern in her dark eyes. She was getting used to this in a way that her family found increasingly worrisome. Generous, observant, and wounded in ways that made her sensitive to other people’s pain, sometimes Rose gave more than any teenager should have to give. She looked away as the Doctor blinked back into the present and self-consciously let go of his sleeve.
“Oh, sorry,” he mumbled, finding a smile and plastering it across his face. “Just... day-dreaming.”
With an automatic snort and a look that she had clearly inherited from her mother’s side, Rose shot him down, and the Doctor’s smile withered.
“I feel like I’ve been here before,” he said, gesturing to the street outside with a vague wave of his hand.
“Like déjà vu?” Rose asked, sitting back and delicately sipping the froth from the top of her drink.
“No. I’ve been here before,” he said. He turned to look out of the window. “Where are we?”
“Boothby’s Coffee Hour,” Rose replied, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “Trafalgar Square is... up there to the left.”
He looked back at the glass building across the street, frowning. Trafalgar Square, he had been here, or hereabouts, more times than he could count, which did not explain the disquiet trickling along his nerves.
The table jostled as an older lady with a wheeled shopping bag tried to squeeze by, setting the coffees into little waves that lapped over the rim.
“Sorry, my loves!” said she, wobbling and using her bag handle as a far too mobile support.
The Doctor was already on his feet, helping the woman to balance, hands on the sleeves of her orange and black dogtooth-checked coat. Rose rescued the coffees before they toppled over, holding them just above the rocking table top.
“No harm done,” Rose replied with her father’s happy-go-lucky smile.
The Doctor helped the woman to a seat and returned with a ghost in his eyes. As he sat, he stared out the window again.
“Did you figure it out then?” Rose asked. “How you know this place, I mean.”
If you knew what you were looking for, it was possible to watch the shutters come down across the Doctor’s face. Rose could practically hear the blinds crashing.
He turned back to his coffee companion, full of smiles and a lighter tone.
“Yes. Fine. All forgotten.”
The Doctor took an exaggerated swig of his latte, giving himself a milky moustache, and beamed.
Rose’s eyebrows raised, but she laughed and tossed a napkin in his direction. Hanging out with the Doctor was one of Rose’s favorite things to do, but there were times when she did not know what to say to his obvious and ridiculous distractions.
At home, Donna handled most of these moments with skill Rose envied. With practised ease, her mother could coax the Time Lord away from his demons, sometimes with an embrace, sometimes with a stern ticking off. Rose was never sure how her mother knew which tactic to employ. In Donna’s absence, Sylvia’s way of coping with the “moodiness of ages” was to issue a sarcastic response that snapped him back into reality. Shaun would slap him on the shoulder, say a word or two of support and, in some inexplicable manly way, the conversation would move on.
“You’ll be glad to leave here too, won’t you?” Rose gestured to the street outside, the people, the traffic, the buildings. “London, I mean. It’s like everywhere we go you get this look, like there’s a ghost around every corner.”
He sipped his drink, avoiding Rose’s eyes. She was just a kid. No, more than that, Rose was Donna’s daughter. There were so many things he could not tell her. Things he should not share.
“I’ve just lived a long time, Rose, and London… and Londoners… seem to have a knack for attracting trouble. Alien or otherwise.”
“When were you last here?”
“In this street?” He looked back across the road to the great glass building, melancholic recollection in his eyes, and sighed. “A few lifetimes ago.”
Rose waited, sipping her drink. It was a trick her mother had been using since Rose was five. Pause. Wait. Let the secrets reveal themselves. It was a silence that Donna deployed whenever she already suspected the truth. It was a silence that had extracted many confessions from Rose over the years, although it was fairly safe to assume Donna had already guessed the lipstick-stealing culprit was not Shaun. It was a silence that, as it turned out, worked just as well on impossibly old Time Lords.
“That used to be a department store,” he said with a sniff and a jerk of his chin. “Henrik’s. Back in 2005.”
She let her silence ride.
“Before I blew it up.”
“You blew up...”
Rose’s response reached a pitch her mother would have been proud of, and under the stares from a nearby table, she lowered her voice.
“You blew up Henrik’s?”
He shrugged it off in the same way Rose might disregard a dropped biscuit crumb on her parent’s sofa.
“Just that branch.”
Rose leant forward, elbows on the table, curious eyes wide, her tone hushed and conspiratorial.
“Why?”
“Oh, you know...” The Doctor sat back, nonchalant. “... Aliens. Intelligent plastic. An entire army, hiding in every shop front.”
“The shop dummies!” Rose exclaimed, beaming. “That was one of my favourite dreams.”
The shadow of a nostalgic smile crossed the Doctor’s face as he looked at Rose. The way she tugged the sleeves of her denim jacket, the curiosity in her eyes, the subtle curl of her lips - all of it reminded him of someone else entirely. Another ghost in a smile. He drew a longer breath and looked back at the glassy monstrosity across the street.
“That’s where I met Rose Tyler.”
He nodded toward the building.
“In the basement. Before I blew it up. Obviously.”
In all of Rose’s early dreams, the fearless and fierce Rose Tyler had been a constant presence. For the last 2 months, it had been a battle to contain the questions burning on the tip of her tongue. One warning look from Donna the first time she’d dared mention Miss Tyler’s name had bought a temporary silence. Now she held her breath, desperate to ask, afraid to harm.
“In my dreams she was... Bold. She was brave,” Rose ventured carefully, trying to employ some of the tact she had seen her mother use in these situations.
He laughed, smiling, sitting back in his seat, a little of the tension lost from his shoulders.
“Oh, Rose was... is... that and so much more.”
A black cab honked its horn outside. They both watched as the driver gesticulated at someone in a suit who had chanced their luck at the flashing traffic lights.
The Doctor’s gaze drifted back to the building that had once been Henrik’s, smile slipping away.
“When I was little, I wanted to be her,” Rose continued. “Or at least, I wanted to be that courageous.”
“She saved my life,” he said, as if that was all he was going to say on the subject, but then took a breath and continued. “Oh, she saved my life many times over the years, but here... this was the first time. Maybe the most important time. Just over there, 10 meters underground, I took her hand... and for the first time since the Time War, I felt alive.”
The Time War. Donna had issued explicit warnings about discussing that topic, and Rose dutifully veered away from it.
“Did you love her?”
It wasn’t a question Rose had intended to ask, but it snuck out anyway.
He looked up sharply, wounded by the prick of remembered pain. The expression was gone before Rose could blink, and he replied with soft acceptance.
“Yes, I really did.”
The way he said it, the distant look on his face, made Rose pause.
He blinked, rubbed his face with both hands, and found a smile, sincere and genuine.
“She would love you.”
Rose gave a light, embarrassed laugh. “Really?”
“Oh, yes!” he declared, beaming. “If Rose knew you’d named yourself after her...”
He mimed his head exploding.
“I would never hear the end of it. She would want to take you clothes shopping, get all the news, hit the clubs ...”
His voice trailed off as he realized he was remembering Rose Tyler, 17, shop girl. She would be what now? Approaching 40? The Rose Tyler he had known was long gone.
What would she be like now?
Was she happy?
Rose Noble looked up and met his eye.
“You still miss her, don’t you?”
He sighed and looked away.
It was more than that. Yes, he missed her; how could he not? He missed them all: Jamie, Leela, Thurlough. Time and the limits of memory had softened some of those blows, whilst others... Sarah Jane, Rose, Amy, Clara... Bill. Even the mention of their names brought back the ache of loss as if it were new.
“You remind me of her,” he said after a pause. “Once in a while. The way you smile, sometimes. The way you tug your jacket sleeves when you’re nervous.”
Rose tried to read his expression. The pain was obvious, but the way he frowned, his eyes dark and hollow, told her something more.
“You feel guilty.”
It wasn’t a question, and the Doctor did not reply. He seemed to shrink within himself.
He wanted to run. Get up. Push the table out of his way and storm out to lick his wounds in private. And if it had been anyone else sitting opposite him, he probably would have done just that. But this was Rose.
Rose, the daughter of his best friend. A best friend who would, quite rightly, kick his arse if he upset her child. Rose, the girl who had dreamt of his life every night for sixteen years. How much did he owe her already?
The Doctor nursed his coffee, swirling the mug, making the contents spin.
“Yes. I feel guilty,” he said eventually as the silence dragged on. “Rose was so young. Seventeen. I had a duty of care.”
“She looked happy.”
The Doctor hesitated and looked up.
“I’m sorry?”
“In my dreams, Rose always looked happy,” she repeated. “Terrified, yes, sometimes, but the way she looked at you... she was so alive... loving every moment.”
“You remember the dreams clearly?”
Rose shrugged, refusing to be drawn into his distraction. Sitting forward again, pushing her drink out of the way, she leant her elbows on the table and tried to catch his eye.
“I would sell my soul for just one trip. If Mum hadn’t completely forbidden it, I would beg you every second for a day out in the universe.”
Of that he had no doubt, and the idea made his blood chill.
“No,” he said firmly. “No more. I’ve put too many people at risk. Lost too many. I will not ruin your life the same way. I’ve done enough damage to you and your family.”
Not knowing what to say, Rose sat back and looked away.
“Humans,” he continued quietly, drawing on the easiest reply. “You’re so fragile. You break so easily.”
They looked at each other at the same moment, eyes locking.
“I couldn’t bear to lose you. Any of you.”
They finished their coffees in silence—Rose unsure what to say, or how to help. The Doctor not trusting himself to say more.
The truth was there was so much he would like to share with Rose. Enthusiasm radiated from her, as brilliant as any sun. The infectious intrigue, the wonder in her eyes that drew him in, just as it always had with everyone who had come before. He felt the old pull to grab her hand and dart off into the universe where she could blaze among the stars. Free to explore. Free to dream.
And free to die, he reminded himself with bitter regret as he drank the dregs from his coffee cup.
No. Not this time.
He watched Rose run her fingers around the rim of her empty mug, immaculate nail polish perfectly matching the shade of her jumper.
The Doctor inhaled hard through both nostrils and shook himself. At the very least, he owed Rose Noble a good story. A little clarity for all those part-remembered dreams. And, if nothing else, London had enough stories nestling in her ancient streets.
He pushed the coffee mug back and stood up, straightening his tie as he held out his hand to Rose, a new lightness in his frame.
“Come with me.”