A/N: I'm gonna TRY and update this once a month. If I get a few chapters ahead I'll post early, but expect this to update during the first few days of each month :-)

Rose woke slowly, the comforting hum of the Tardis pushing back against the panic that came to life inside her mind at the unfamiliar feel of a bed beneath her and a blanket wrapped around her frame.

Letting the sudden tension that consciousness had wrought leak from her frame, Rose gradually let her eyes flicker open and absorb her current surroundings. It was the Tardis medical room. She'd not been there often enough to know it by heart, and this one was a little different to the one she had in her memories, but the machines she did recognise combined with the Tardis hum reassured her that this was not a dream.

That meant, of course, that her escape from the Daleks the previous... day? That hadn't been a dream either, and neither was an early version of her Doctor staring at her across the icy landscape of Women Wept.

Drawing in a deep breath, Rose held it and let her eyes flutter closed before letting it out in a long soft sigh. The potential repercussions of the Dalek's actions on her own personal timeline were spinning around in her head, and she took a moment to settle her thoughts. It was more difficult that it should have been, and a new worry sprang to mind almost instantly.

How long had she been held by the Daleks, and what kind of damage had that imprisonment done to her psyche? She wasn't stupid enough to think that her captivity had caused zero side effects but to find out what kind she was going to need a Doctor.

First of all though, what Rose needed most of all was a bathroom and a clean change of clothes, and as she carefully pushed herself into an upright position, the lights in the infirmary brightened and the door slid open quietly, bringing a soft smile to her features.

"Thank you, you wonderful ship," Rose whispered, even knowing that the Tardis could get inside her head. She slid to the floor, taking a moment to make sure that her legs would take her weight, before stumbling over to the hallway, and opening the first door she came across.

As she had hoped, the Tardis had supplied her with exactly what she'd been craving and within minutes, Rose was sinking into a hot bath, large enough to be considered a small swimming pool.

She knew, just from the tone of the ships hum, that after this indulgence she would have to face the Doctor. Honestly, considering the things the Daleks had revealed, Rose was a little surprised he'd left her alone long enough to sleep, but a part of her suspected Tardis intervention.

Regardless of the reasons, she was grateful for the space, and the quiet, and the human moment the long hot bath allowed her while she attempted to organise the mess her mind was in.

If she counted by meals, and assumed two meals a day, Dalek Caan had kept her for nearly six months. At first she'd tried talking to the Dalek, trying to figure out his plan, and then she'd tried keeping her physical strength up by pacing her cell and keeping to a strict routine of push ups, and sit ups and jogging on the spot but then the last survivor of the Cult of Skaro had flown the both of them into the time war, and for the last few weeks Rose had been too busy watching in horror as the Dalek fleets decimated their way through world after world, all the while seeking out an opportunity to parade her around in front of the Doctor.

Without thinking, her hand came down on the edge of the bath, slamming into the tiles and making her hiss in pain.

"Stupid bloody Daleks!" she snarled, suddenly furious with them and her breath came in short angry gasps as she slowly forced herself to unclench her fist, sitting up in the bath and wrapping her arms around her knees as the tears finally came.

Rose didn't know how long she sat there, crying softly now that she finally had a chance to fall apart but eventually the Tardis hum shifted and Rose raised her head from her knees to glance around the room, somehow knowing that the Time Lord must be growing impatient by now.

"Yeah, all right... just.. give me a minute or two," she promised he ship softly, before ducking her head under the water and proceeding to quickly scrub the dirt and grime from her hair.

She got out of the bath quickly after that, dried off and got dressed in some clean jeans and a soft long sleeved tunic top. She asked the Tardis to let her into the kitchen and while she moved through the hallways, her feet silent in a pair of soft slippers, she braided her hair into a long plait that settled along her center of her back.

She was only in the kitchen long enough to boil a kettle before the Doctor was there, standing in the doorway and staring at her like she was some great mystery of the universe and, she supposed, that to him she might be.

"Tea?" she asked softly, picking up a second cup and waving it at him, and after a long moment of puzzled silence he nodded.

"How do you take it in this body?" she asked, and his eyebrows rose at her casual reference to regeneration, but he answered her a moment later, with a slight twitch of his lips that may or may not have been a smile.

"Black, one sugar."

She nodded and moved around the kitchen with a relaxed air, despite feeling his eyes burning into her skin. It didn't matter what draw she opened or which cupboard she searched, whatever she was looking for the Tardis placed at her fingertips and after a moment she heard the Doctor loose a soft laugh.

"My Tardis seems inordinately fond of you," he told her, his voice warm and light and Rose paused a moment before shooting a smile over her shoulder.

"Your Tardis and me are best friends, I love her and I hope the feeling's mutual," Rose explained, and a moment later the time ships hum shifted to an almost musical melody before settling back into the constant comforting background sound that it usually was.

Rose made a point of not reacting to the ships display, or to the Doctor's shell shocked expression, simply moving to place his tea in front of him before taking a seat across the small table with her own hot drink.

The pair of them sat in silence for a few minutes, quietly sipping at their own drinks but when Rose got halfway through her tea and the Doctor had made no sign of starting the conversation she knew needed to happen, she sighed and placed her cup on the table cradled between her hands.

"You know I won't be able to tell you everything... but... what do you want to know?" she offered, meeting his blue eyes, so different to his next self. The blue eyes she would discover after the Time War would be hard and icy, but these ones were like the sparkling blue of a lake's surface on a hot summers day. Warm and inviting, it was all Rose could do not to slide into his lap and study every nuance of his face, every hidden shadow behind his eyes, tucked away at the bottom of that inviting lake.

And then he looked away, eyes shifting down to stare into his mug of half drunk tea, and Rose leant back in her chair to take a steadying breath of much needed air.

"How long, were you a captive of the Daleks?" he asked, and it wasn't the first question she had expected to spring to his lips, but Rose had promised him all the answers she could give so she just shrugged.

"Near as I can tell, somewhere between five and six months, but they didn't exactly give me a calendar."

"Who are you?" he asked, and Rose hesitated, biting at her lip as she considered her options.

"One day, still to come in your timeline, I'll travel with you... so, I don't know how much I can tell you," she said softly, "I don't know how much damage the Daleks have already done, I mean... even seeing my face before you've technically met me for the first time..." she shook her head as the Doctor seemed to study her.

"For a human you appear to have an unusually in depth understanding of the intricacies of time," he said after a moment, and Rose blinked at him in surprise, "but Time Lords are particularly resistant to paradoxes... So long as you tell me about you and as little as possible about my own future then I'm certain I can suppress the relevant memories."

"A lot of your future and my past are intertwined," Rose warned, and watched the Time Lord almost wince at the implications. She bit her lip and considered him before nodding, almost to herself.

"Answer me this, then... Why do you run?" she asked, keeping her voice soft, and his eyes lit up with curiosity.

"Run?" the Doctor asked, feeling oddly vulnerable in the face of her smile.

"I know I'm a stranger to you right now, but I do know you Doctor. Nearly three years, linear time, we travelled together and I know that's a drop in the bucket for a Time Lord but... I need to know the answer to know how much I can tell you," she finished gently and the Doctor frowned.

"Why do I run?" he repeated and Rose nodded, before the pair dropped into the comforting silence of two old friends.

Rose finished her tea in that silence, seeming perfectly content to wait for his answer and the Doctor found himself mesmerised by her presence. Something told him that she already knew the answer to her question, but it was the way in which he was going to answer that would tell her how she would respond to his own questions and he suddenly wanted to be painfully honest with this simple human girl.

"Another tea?" she offered, rising to her feet with her own mug clasped in her hand and the Doctor nodded, surrendering his cup and watching her move over to the kettle, once more preparing them drinks with the aid of the Tardis and not so much as batting an eye when the ship placed exactly what she needed right beneath her fingertips.

The Tardis wasn't just fond of her, he knew. The Tardis adored this small human girl, and there was a warning buzz in the back of his mind from the time ship not to screw this up, so he forced himself to answer her question, finding it easier now that he wasn't faced with soul deep honey brown eyes staring at him from across the table.

"I run... so that I'm not left behind," he admitted softly and the blonde nodded without turning around.

"My name is Rose Tyler and we first meet on Earth in 2005 when I'm nineteen years old," she says simply, and for some reason he can't figure out both of his hearts start pounding. There is a simple truth to the sound of her voice, and even though he can't see her face he somehow knows that she's not lying.

"You show me the universe, the good and the bad, and we save lives... not all of them, but those that we can... and eventually there comes a time when you try to run ahead of me, to leave me behind."

He doesn't try to dispute her words because he knows himself. Everyone leaves him eventually, and he can easily see how this woman would quickly be able to worm her way beneath his defences. That kind of vulnerability has never sat well with him and running ahead of her, leaving her behind and sending her home again were all tried and true methods of avoiding that vulnerability.

"But, what you hadn't figured out at that point was that you didn't just whisk me away from my life, you taught me how to run too... and I kept up with you," she said calmly, stirring the tea's now and he suspected they were more than ready, but she kept her back to him and he was grateful. He didn't know if he'd be able to listen to what she was saying if he was faced with the emotions he was somehow sure were swirling in her eyes.

"I came back and we ran together. Side by side across the universe... to each other, we were a hand to hold..."

"Did I love you?" he asked, his whole frame freezing as he realised that the words were no longer contained inside his mind where they had been ricocheting around his brain since the Daleks had shouted their terrifying question across the ice and Rose froze too, just for an instant, before she placed the spoon on the counter and picked up the two fresh tea's, returning to the table and placing them both down before taking a seat and the whole time the Doctor never moved, his eyes fixed on her as he awaited her answer.

His frame was frozen, torn between fear and hope at what she might say, and his respiratory bypass only disengaged when she raised her soft gaze back to his.

"I don't know," she offered simply, "I told you I loved you once but... something happened, you never got the chance to reply... and after that... well, you never said one way or the other."

"It needed saying?" he asked on a whisper, and her head whipped up so quickly that he knew that he'd said something similar to her before.

"What?"

The question bordered on a demand and the Doctor weighed his choices quickly. He could brush off the comment, and lie to the woman. She had clearly resigned herself to never knowing his true feeling for sure, and perhaps his lie would help her to move on, but as he considered it the Tardis buzzed angrily at him.

His other option was to explain, as his older self clearly hadn't, the nature of loving a telepath. Considering that she had only been on board the Tardis for a little under two days, and for most of that time she'd been asleep, the Doctor was a little concerned at how much he wanted her to understand. He wanted her to know him and to stay, no matter how impossible that might be.

She would have to leave him before he could go and find her younger self, after all, but perhaps he could give his future self a gift.

"Time Lords are telepathic, Rose," he explained carefully, watching her features as she stared at him like he was about to disappear, "We rarely, if ever, speak of such things aloud... It's something that should be shared between two people and no one else, and speaking of such things aloud-"

"Oh god..." Rose moaned, her eyes slipping closed, as her mind spun back to the heartbreaking moment on Bad Wolf Bay with herself and two Doctors and four hearts on the line.

"Oh that... you... I thought you were..."

Her reaction told him more than he had expected, and he cursed his future self. What had possessed him to not explain this to the woman? She was human, they had no idea how telepathy worked, this woman would have had no basis of understanding and yet somehow she'd grasped what he was saying incredibly quickly.

"You are human, aren't you?" he asked suddenly, his head tipping slightly in curiosity and Rose's eyes opened slowly to stare at him, his new question apparently sufficient, for the moment, to distract her.

"Sorry?"

"You never actually confirmed it, what with the Daleks and the running and the sleeping... but, you are human?"

"Uh... well..." she hesitated, and his eyes widened, "I... that's a little complicated," she tried and the Doctor frowned.

"How? You either are or you're not..."

"I was born human, only I'm not quite human... anymore..." she offered hesitantly, and the Doctor found himself turning her words over in his mind and trying to make sense of them.

"Changing your entire species is not something that's easily accomplished," he said eventually, "So, what are you now?"

As far as he could tell it was a simple question, but Rose seemed to hesitate her fingers gently curling around her mug of tea while he watched her turn several potential responses over in her head. Apart from some necessary vagueness to protect timeline, she hadn't lied to him yet. He could practically taste the sincerity rolling off her but something told him that, for the first time, she was considering pitching a falsehood and the Doctor found himself studying her intently.

Eyes flickering across her face and posture, ears straining for the words she would eventually settle on, the Doctor was poised and ready to dissect the impending falsehood before it finished falling from her lips, but after a long tension filled moment Rose just sighed heavily and sat back in the kitchen chair before raising her mug of tea to her lips.

It was only when that same mug was back in it's spot, cradled between her hands, on the kitchen table that Rose brought an answer to her lips.

"It wasn't planned... I made a decision, spur of the moment, and the... changes were a side effect of that decision... so... I'm not entirely sure what I am, only that I'm not completely human any more."

The Doctor frowned at her for a moment as he tried to puzzle out her vague explanations but eventually shook his head, unable to make any sense of her.

"What aren't you telling me?" he asked, gentle but firm and was surprise to find honest amusement flickering through her amber eyes.

"A lot," she admitted easily, shrugging one shoulder, "I'm not supposed to be here. The Daleks brought me here for the express purpose of destroying you... while that failed, I have no intention of completing their work for them by shattering your timelines with a single misplaced word," she told him, her voice just as gentle and just as firm and for an instant the Doctor's blood ran cold as he began to realise that this simple human woman might actually be a match for him. Might actually be able to out talk him, out manoeuvre him, might be able to best him at his own game of avoidance and gentle manipulation but a moment later he shook the thought free and considered her again.

Impossible. No matter how impressive she thought she was, and no matter what species she'd managed to change herself into, she was still, essentially, human.

"If I wanted to run some tests...?" he asked softly, and Rose hesitated.

"I'd... I'd ask that you wait until I find your future incarnation," she finally said, her words slow and hesitant and the Doctor studied her again, still trying to puzzle out this strange woman across from him.

"Is that what you want?" he kept his voice quiet and gentle, but Rose still jumped as though he'd shouted.

"What? Of course it is, why wouldn't I?" she demanded her voice sharp and the Doctor suddenly found it difficult to swallow at this open display of loyalty.

"Well... travelling with me doesn't seem to have done you much good so fa-"

The Doctor fell into a stunned silence when she growled at him. Literally growled, with narrowed eyes and a frustrated kind of anger sparking in her eyes and he felt the kind of awe rising in his chest that he only felt when faced with a natural phenomenon of the universe like a plasma storm, or the formation of a new nebula.

"Doctor... I know you're trying to be... kind," Rose forced out between clenched teeth before taking a deep breath and trying to relax, her eyes slipping closed as she reigned in the anger his words had elicited, "but you've only had the highlights of the direct events that brought me to this specific place and time... That doesn't paint a particularly clear picture so, just so you know... all the good parts happened when I was with you, the bad stuff always happened when we were separated so..."

Rose paused a moment, letting her eyes slide open again to glare across at the frozen Time Lord, "don't for a single moment think about trying to stop me finding you again... If I find the right you, and you don't want me travelling with you anymore, that's different... but this you, right now? You don't know our shared history, everything we've fought and been through, so you can't make that decision," she warned and after a moment the Doctor nodded his agreement.

An awkward silence fell over the kitchen and after a moment Rose blushed and shook her head, "I'm sorry... I don't think being a prisoner of the Daleks did much for my social niceties," she muttered and suddenly the Doctor grinned at her.

"You're lucky you're functioning at all," he admitted softly, "I can forgive a few emotional outbursts."

She raised her eyes to his sparkling blue again and returned the soft smile he was sending her making him nod to himself, "right then, Miss Tyler, time to get you back to me then," he announced, rising to his feet as Rose blinked, startled.

"Sorry?"

"Well, the Tardis is the best way to find another version of myself," he explained, holding out a hand to help her to her feet, smiling when she accepted it and moved to stand beside him without releasing her grip on his hand, "I could always just drop you off on your planet in the right time, but you're interesting, and there's so few things in the universe that still interest me so that means there must be a me out there, somewhere, who's missing you terribly."

Rose gazed at him for a few seconds, long enough that his smile had started to slip and a concerned frown had begun to creep across his face when she suddenly dropped his hand and flung her arms around his neck. The Doctor loosed a startled sound from the back of his throat but his own arms curled around her waist automatically and he found that he rather enjoyed hugging the small blonde who was whispering words of thanks against his frock coat.

"Come now, enough of that," he managed eventually, "it's no trouble. Besides, I can't take you back to Gallifrey... no humans allowed so I'll have to take you somewhere, and that somewhere might as well be with another me," the Doctor explained, pulling back a little when he felt her arms loosen.

She'd not broken down in his arms, but her face had a couple of tear tracks streaked across it and the Doctor found his hands cupping her jaw, thumbs brushing away her tears, as she beamed at him and the voice in his head that told him to run was practically screaming at him in that moment but he silenced it ruthlessly.

"Rose Tyler," he said softly, and watched her features soften instantly, "I think I'm going to regret having to forget about you."

"Will you be able to remember all of this, when I find you again?" she asked and the Doctor smiled, thrilled at the question.

"I can set a trigger, certainly... It would have to be something only you would say to me though," he warned and Rose took a step back from him as she frowned, clearly turning words over in her mind before an almost sad smile crept over her face before she nodded.

"I create myself."

The Doctor was silent for a long moment before huffing a laugh, "very well, and I won't ask what that means; You do keep presenting intriguing mysteries, Rose" he scolded gently, and she grinned but didn't respond to the playful prod.

"Console room?" she asked and the Doctor nodded.

"Yes. The sooner I get you back to myself, the sooner I'll get answers,"

He held out his hand again, and Rose slipped hers into his grasp without hesitation. Her fingers linked with his in moments and the ease of the motion made his head spin as he wondered how many hundreds of times they must have done that for her to respond so instinctively, but he didn't ask.

They moved through the Tardis together, her hum sad, and he noticed that the fingers of Rose's other hand were trailing along the wall in response, but he forced himself not to ask about that either.

It was only when they stepped into the wood panelled console room that he released her hand, moving to the controls and stepping around the central column with a forced casualness that he suspected wasn't fooling Rose for a moment.

"There we go, I'll use the Tardis to track down a version of myself after the last time you saw me... should only take a few moments... there, she says she's got it... and now..." he moved faster now, before he could change his mind and Rose quickly found a place where she could hang onto something, making him grin at her familiarity with Tardis travel.

It was only when he spun the last dial and flipped the lever that would have them materialising beside his future Tardis that the Doctor realised the warning resonating through the Tardis' hum inside his mind but it was too late, the lever had slid home and he winced waiting for the explosion.

There was no fire though, no crackle of dangerous power or shuddering landing. What happened was, in the Doctor's humble opinion, worse.

He'd done everything right.

He'd entered the space-time coordinates his ship had located, and performed a flawless materialisation sequence to drop them out of the vortex and into the correct place, right next to his future self and the future Tardis but, despite all of that, the Tardis hadn't moved.

Silence reigned in the control room and he could feel Rose's eyes on him as he waited, the Tardis' warning still ringing in his mind.

"What... what happened?" Rose asked as the Doctor stood frozen next to the console and watched him swallow hard before flipping the final lever again.

"Nothing," the Doctor said, sliding the lever back into it's 'on' position firmly, and once more the Tardis stayed silent and unmoving so he stepped back from the controls and turned to stare at Rose, meeting her eyes from across the room.

"If nothing's happened then why aren't we moving?" she asked slowly, as though already suspecting the answer and hoping he'd prove her theory wrong, but the Doctor just shook his head.

"Nothing's happening, because the Tardis seems to be stuck in the vortex."