The Doctor holds out to her a bag filled with things that he swears she won't be able to live without. Considering that Rose is fairly certain she caught a glimpse of him placing an extra large tub of Marmite inside, she's not all that certain that's entirely on the up-and-up. Besides, the only thing she really wants from him is out of her reach, and certainly isn't stowed away inside some bigger-on-the-inside backpack of potentially useless alien party tricks.

Still, the bag dangles pointedly from his fist, which is clenched so tightly his knuckles have gone white.

"For Rassilon's sake, the amount of ridiculous sentiment in the air is making me feel ill. It's just a carrier full of junk, not some sort of all-encompassing symbol of your tragically soppy would-be romance."

They both ignore the mocking voice; for all that they're both unavoidably aware of the man's presence, since they wouldn't be doing this otherwise, this is one moment when he's really just not important. Not to Rose, anyway, and the Doctor does a good job of at least pretending that he feels the same.

Rose stares at the bag and the Doctor stares at Rose, both of them in silence. When it eventually becomes clear that neither of them seems likely to break that moment, Jack reaches forward and pries the stupid thing out of the Doctor's hand himself. The Doctor and Jack probably share some sort of loaded stare themselves, right then. If so, then Rose doesn't see it, for she's still looking at where the bag had been, staring at the empty space between them as if it shouldn't exist.

The Doctor doesn't tell Jack to take care of Rose, just as Jack doesn't swear to the Doctor in return that Rose is in good hands. Rose is well aware that they've already managed to convey these things to each other. It's how those two deal with their feelings; they make everything about Rose because they're both such men, which means that they're both completely ridiculous about just admitting that they care for each other, and will miss each other.

Rose doesn't whisper, "Don't," as she's been dying to ever since she first had any inkling that the Doctor was planning something that she wasn't going to like. It's not that it doesn't need saying. There's just no point.

Even if Rose wasn't far too proud to get down begging on her knees on the biting metal of the console room's grated floor, the Doctor wouldn't (and couldn't) change his mind. All she'd be doing would be opening herself up to further sneering mockery from the Master, who's already watching the exchange between the three of them as if they're the ones who should be permanently locked up for being stark raving mad.

Rose doesn't even ask what he expects her to do without him. The Doctor's made it clear each of the other times he's tried to leave her behind for her 'own good' that he wants her to somehow make a life for herself in his absence. Not just any life, either. A wonderful life. A fantastic life.

What's finally clear to her now, though, is that the Doctor obviously has no intention of being held to that same standard. How can he? He might not have fully explained why she can't stay on board the TARDIS with both he and the Master, other than some half-hearted comment about the Master being dangerous, but Rose is actually capable of reading between the lines. The Doctor isn't just planning on locking the Master in some out of the way room in the TARDIS and then forgetting all about him, just so that the rest of the universe will be safe from him. He's planning to lock both of them in there, together, with nothing but each other as company for no telling how many years, decades, centuries.

Rose can't see how a man who's already as damaged as the Doctor could possibly weather that long in the Master's presence without going insane himself. She also thinks the whole thing is pointless anyway, because the Master seems to be well and truly beyond being helped. She doesn't say that either, though, because she understands that the Master is the Doctor's family, sort of – he's all the family the Doctor has left, apparently, whatever sort of bond Rose might have suspected was finally beginning to form between them. Knowing that, it's obvious that there's no way the Doctor will ever just give up on him, even when he really should.

The last thing Rose Tyler ever expected was that she'd one day just voluntarily walk out of the TARDIS, knowing that she'll probably never see the Doctor again. More than once before she's fought tooth and nail to get back to him, after all, when things that so much more obviously threatening than a single dangerous man had been forcing them apart. Yet still she finds herself not even attempting to burst back through that blue wooden door as it shuts right in front of her. Her last view inside the TARDIS is not of the Doctor, or even of the time rotor, but rather of the grin that distorts the Master's face as he lounges against a coral strut.

They hadn't even hugged goodbye, Rose realises numbly as the sound of the TARDIS disappearing off into the relative safety and isolation of the Time Vortex starts up. Perhaps she's glad for that, actually. She can't imagine she could have pulled herself away again if they had.

When the TARDIS is gone, with the wind now whipping stray leaves through the place where it stood just moments ago, Jack holds out his hand.

"Come and meet my team," he says softly.

Rose really does consider it for a moment. She thinks about staying with Jack, and continuing to have to watch him die over and over again without ever being able to just die, all because of her. She thinks about having a group of complete strangers just step into the part of her life that's filled with aliens and running and adrenaline; the part that only the Doctor has ever really filled until now. Worse yet, she thinks about staying in Cardiff, the place that will now always be first and foremost the place where the Doctor left her behind.

"I don't think so," she says instead.

She walks off, leaving Jack standing alone in the nearly deserted Bay, still gripping the bag that had been meant for her.

Rose glares at the package she's been sent as if it can help the fact that she knows exactly what's inside it and doesn't want it, thanks ever so. Of course she knows. Jack's only mentioned the damn bag all six times he's called her so far this month, not to mention all of the calls the month before just after they parted ways. Rose eventually gave him the address of the hostel she's staying at in the vain hope that it might at least decrease the number of times he calls her with that cajoling tinge to his voice.

Then again, the fact that she's admitted that she's living at a hostel has probably just worried him enough that he'll call her even more often. She's actually sort of surprised she isn't being shadowed by one of Jack's London contacts (probably from UNIT, if Jack could get them to get over their inter-departmental pissing match long enough to call in one of the many favours they apparently owe him). After all, the real reason that Jack keeps phoning her, always casually mentioning that she should come back to Cardiff, is that he doesn't quite believe her when she says she's absolutely fine on her own. She doesn't believe it either, of course. However, they're both familiar enough with the necessary fictions people tell themselves just to get through each day to let the lie stand, for the most part. Jack settles for checking up on her, knowing not to push too hard.

She might not be fine, exactly, but for the last five weeks she's been coping. Considering she's been dumped into a world where she has next to no money and where (much more importantly) her only family and friends either believe she's been dead for over a year or are living their own lives off in a parallel universe without her (or have purposely stranded themselves off somewhere in space alone with a madman, but she's trying not to think about that), the constant and shifting stream of people staying at the hostel has been just about the perfect backdrop to her current mode of existence.

Of course, she has to try very hard to pretend that she doesn't recognise something about those short interactions where she just barely manages to start getting to know people before they're out of her life again. She suppresses the idea that this is how he must have seen her and all those other humans he's met, and that that's exactly why he chose his own kind over her in the end. In her more honest moments, though, she does wonder whether that's exactly what she'd been seeking out when she'd first checked in. She hopes not. While she's always wanted to understand the Doctor – him leaving hasn't had much of an effect on that impulse to finally figure him out, really – she doesn't want to become him. Not that part of him, anyway. There are so many things about him that she'd be proud to share, but not that sense of loneliness that's partly due to circumstance, but partly (and Rose privately thinks it's the larger part) self-enforced.

When she finds that she can't prevent herself from dwelling on that depressing thought any longer, she knows that it's finally time to move on.

She might not be out there facing off with aliens anymore – she doesn't even want to be, for now at least, not without him there to share it with her – but there's one thing that Rose has learned from the Doctor that she's never going to just forget about, or stop doing, no matter what. He's taught her that she doesn't have to settle for a life like this, where the world just passes her by.

She thinks she's ready to go looking for more again. She's not entirely sure what that 'more' might entail, at this stage, but she has a pretty decent idea where to start looking for ideas.

After nearly demolishing the cardboard packing box, she looks at the bag for a long time before she can finally bring herself to open it.

Even after months of it, she's still not sure how to explain her job to people. 'Performer' is what she tells strangers in the pub if they get up the courage to ask about her wacky outfit of the evening. Unfortunately, that usually just gets them interested enough to want to ask further questions. She hasn't really got the answers. It's just an act, she'll say, and it changes from day to day. There's not really much more to it.

One time some bloke tries to comment on the psychological ramifications of what that answer says about her. Rose stands up in the middle of one of his overly self-aggrandising and drawn-out sentences and walks away without directing another word or even glance at him. Sure, it's rude, but not as much so as what she might have said had she bothered to say anything at all to him just then. She gets enough of that analytical rubbish (which she knows isn't actually rubbish at all, but which she doesn't need shoved in her face, either) from Jack. He at least has some right, as a friend, to comment.

The other performers she travels with sort of get what this new life of hers is all about, anyway, so that's something. It's kind of like being part of a travelling circus, what they all do, except that they aren't really one big team, but rather a bunch of individuals who just happen to move around together, each doing their own thing. They're still close enough to almost be like a little family. They're the only constants in each others' lives, after all.

It's a different sort of connection to the one she can't help but dream about every night, and it's obvious that she's no longer living that life that she'd loved so much. It's important, though, that she's still doing something out of the ordinary. That's what she wanted. What she needed.

She never does the same thing two nights in a row, which is why it's all so difficult to explain it to outsiders. She doesn't have to ever repeat herself, with the vast array of bits and pieces she's still stumbling across and figuring out the purpose of in the tattered little backpack the Doctor had given her. She also finds that she has a lot of other strange little skills to contribute to her acts. She'd never really expected to use the little gymnastics tricks she's retained over the years in a job one day, for starters. Then again, she'd never expected to be able to save a man's life, and potentially the whole of London, with them either.

"Are you a magician's assistant?" a youngish sort of girl – Rose thinks she'll be surprised to find out that the girl's actually old enough to legally be drinking that pint of beer – asks her when Rose stops in at the local for a bite before work.

Rose can't fault her guess, considering the sheer mass of sequins that make up the costumes she's already wearing to save the time and effort of getting changed later. It's another thing the bag still hasn't come close to running out of: weird and wonderful (and, to be honest, occasionally truly hideous) outfits.

The girl's not that far off the truth, Rose supposes.

"Tonight?" Rose says thoughtfully. "Sure. Why not. Though I guess I'd have to be the magician as well. Bit of a one-girl act, lately."

The girl looks somewhat confused by this reply, but Rose figures she'd probably prefer remaining in the dark to receiving the far more condescending – but completely true – answer that Rose can choose to be whatever she wants to be, as long as she's of a mind to try it out. It sounds like the sort of thing her school had once handed out on pamphlets that did nothing but kill the environment one tree at a time.

This life she's living now doesn't compare to what she's lost, nor does it really begin to make up for it. How could it? But it's something. It's hers for now, and she's surprisingly all right with it for now. When that stops being the case, there's nothing to stop her from moving onto something else.

Maybe one day she'll even be ready to finally take Jack up on that perpetual offer of his. Maybe.

It figures, Rose thinks, that as soon as she finally finds herself in London again, she ends up smack in the middle of an alien invasion. They can't seem to stay away from the capital, for some reason.

She supposes she can't either, when it comes right down to it.

Still, Rose knows that dealing with this sort of thing probably isn't something she can jump right back into on her own. Not when it's on this scale. Facing off against an entire pack of incredibly solid-looking purple aliens that tower above the tops of the trees in the park they're stampeding through is clearly one of those times when having a list of phone contacts like hers comes in handy.

"Harkness," Jack answers his phone brusquely.

"Giant purple space rhinos," Rose greets.

"Rose? That you? I can't even hear you properly. What's with all the noise?"

"Giant. Purple. Space Rhinos," she enunciates loudly.

There's silence on the other end for a moment. "Seriously?" Jack asks. "Where?"

"Where else?" Rose shouts over the roaring sounds the aliens are making. She shakes her head ruefully. "Right in the middle of London. Where you really need to be in two minutes flat, so I hope you've managed to fix that teleport you keep goin' on about havin' salvaged. Otherwise there might not be much of London left when you get here."

Over the noise around her, Rose barely makes out Jack muttering, "You'd really think that sort of thing would be on the news, even in Wales." Then he hangs up.

Seven minutes later, as he strides down the dirt road towards her (pointedly ignoring her crossed arms and tapping foot), Jack says, "You know that London's supposed to be UNIT's jurisdiction these days, not Torchwood's."

"What, the Captain Jack Harkness can't even manage to keep it quiet that he's crept into the enemy's territory?" Rose teases. Then she sobers as she notices the careworn look that hadn't marred Jack's face the last time she laid eyes on him, even after a whole year of pretty much non-stop torture by a psychopath.

She wonders what the heck's been going on in Cardiff, to make him look like that.

"I bet they'll appreciate the help even if they find out," Rose says more seriously. "This is pretty all-hands-on-deck. Speaking of which, where're the others? And what took you so long to get here, anyways?"

"They're driving here, unfortunately. The teleport's still not working properly yet," Jack says dryly. "We can't really guarantee that the things that go in on one end will come out in one piece at the other."

Rose winces. That would explain the state of Jack's shirt. She looks away uncomfortably. "Ouch," she mumbles.

"Yeah," Jack agrees. "Not what I'd call the best feeling ever."

She stares at him, still not quite sure what to say about this strange and unasked-for quirk of Jack's existence that's entirely her fault.

Jack is the one who breaks the awkwardness, tilting his head slightly to the right and looking past her. He articulately states, "Huh."

Rose follows his gaze. "Yep. Those'd be the big purple rampagin' aliens."

"It's kind of like someone took a small army of Judoon and gave them massive amounts of growth hormones," Jack says, flicking one of his guns out of its holster without taking his eyes of the sight of the alien horde in the distance.

"Hormones that... what? Just happened to turn them purple?" Rose asks.

Jack smirks, which seems to transform his face momentarily back to the way Rose remembers him. "Remind me when this is over to tell you about this time on Rayon IX."

"Did you happen to end up purple? And maybe naked? At the same time, even?"

"Hey," Jack chastises her half-heartedly. "No jumping to the end of the story. It ruins it."

Jack extends the gun out towards her, grip first, looking at her expectantly. Rose hesitates. She's long since realised that not everyone can survive life-threatening alien invasions with just a smile, a bit of rambling and a couple of paperclips reforged into some nifty gadget, especially not when there's no heavily protected time ship to run off to when things inevitably go seriously, horribly wrong. That doesn't mean that she feels comfortable being one of the ones to handle the weapons, though. Even if she hadn't been as likely to shoot herself in the foot as to successfully aim at the threats, she thinks the Doctor's rubbed off on her just enough over the years that it might take her a while to get past that.

She hates to think of what sort of circumstances might make her become comfortable pointing a gun at a living being like that. She shivers. Just as well she's got her bag of never-ending tricks slung over her shoulder, as always. That's the only weapon she wants or needs.

It's like having a piece of the Doctor with her. Heading into her first alien encounter since he left her behind, she thinks that's more essential than any arsenal.

A tree is hurled across the park, effectively focusing both of them on the issue at hand.

"Right," Rose says, trying to sound confident. "We're totally gonna be able to handle this. Giant purple space rhinos usin' foliage nearly as big as they are as projectiles? Not even a problem at all."

"You should really stop calling them 'giant purple space rhinos'. It might make them angry. Angrier, anyway," Jack muses.

"Oh yeah? When they stop tearin' the whole of London apart, I swear I'll get close enough to ask them what the PC term is," Rose says, glaring.

An explosion goes off across the park.

"That'll be UNIT," Rose says. She breaks into a run.

"'Bout time they got here," Jack replies from slightly behind her, though she can hear he's quickly closing the gap she's opened up between them by jumping into action so quickly. It's nice to know her reflex to run immediately towards danger is still intact. "It's a sad state of affairs when I manage to beat them coming all the way from Cardiff," Jack adds.

"Go on, you wouldn't have it any other way," Rose pants slightly.

She doesn't even need to see Jack's smile to know it's true. He loves being in the thick of it, just as she always had.

As she does, she realises suddenly. Still. She hasn't felt this sort of rush in nearly a year, and she's missed it.

She's not entirely sure what she thinks she's going to be able to do to help, given the situation. Even the contents of the bag she's clutching against her body might not give her any edge against aliens that are so large and brutally physical that she might not be able to even get close to them. But the running is certainly good, even if it makes her out-of-practice lungs burn. Her laughter, which is the most genuine outburst she's had in a while, is apparently contagious. Jack joins in as he sprints alongside her.

When Jack asks her yet again to come back to Cardiff with him once they've successfully subdued the aliens (who knew that eight dozen extra-large falafels would come so in handy?), Rose sees that this time he doesn't look concerned for her the same way he had the day the Doctor dropped them off, and the way she imagines he must have looked each and every time they've talked on the phone, based on his tone of voice. No, this time he just looks... hopeful.

For all that Jack talks and talks about what's happening with his Torchwood team when he calls, Rose is well aware that he doesn't really tell her any of the important things. She should really have asked, she knows. But she didn't, and now it's a bit late to take that back. Right now, though, she knows that look in his eyes. She's seen it more times than she wants to think about on the Doctor's face. Both versions of him, in fact.

This time, she's not just going to sit back and let Jack keep his secrets. Not if they're hurting him this way. It's about time for her to be the caring friend.

She tells him she'll think about it. Perhaps he senses that she's actually serious, and that her determination to stay out of that life is slipping away, because he actually does look cheered by that promise.

In the end, it doesn't take her all that long to think. Perhaps it would have, she guesses, if she was left to her own devices. It's already taken her long enough just to get to the point that she's considering it, after all. But as fate (or perhaps just purely the tenacity of certain red-heads) would have it, she had more than a little help.

"Rose?"

Rose believes in coincidence, really she does. She's just not sure that she believes that this is a coincidence. In a city filled with millions of people, how likely is it really that she'd just happen to run into Donna Noble at the shops just two days before Christmas, nearly exactly two years after the TARDIS had been drawn to Earth – and to Donna more specifically – by the presence of Huon particles.

As Donna recounts her story of how much she wishes she'd taken Rose and the Doctor up on the offer to travel with them, and how she's been looking for them ever since, Rose wishes she could offer Donna what she so clearly wants. She wishes she could say that even if the Doctor didn't claim to be a second-chances kind of guy, Rose would make sure that he didn't try to leave Donna behind if that's what Donna wants. After all, if Rose could promise that, that would mean not only that she could help Donna, but also that Rose herself was still travelling with the Doctor.

No matter how much she tries to tell herself – and others – otherwise, that's still the only thing she really wants in all the universe.

So Rose doesn't offer, and after a long expectant silence Donna sort of deflates, possibly believing that Rose has just plain decided she'd rather not have her along. Rose half believes that Donna would just invite herself right on inside of the TARDIS if it was in eyeshot, and never mind Rose having to offer, but things haven't played out that way, more's the pity.

"He's gone. The Doctor, I mean," Rose says. It's the first time she's admitted it aloud. She really never wants to say those words at all, but Rose doesn't want to be cruel, either. Donna deserves to know the truth. "I'm not travellin' with him anymore."

"Oh," Donna says. She frowns in confusion, as if she'd never thought that it was even a possibility that the Doctor would ever leave Rose, just like that.

Rose wishes that she herself hadn't had that very possibility forced on her enough times that it wasn't so much a surprise, in the end.

To fill the silence, Rose tells Donna all about travelling on her own. Donna's suitably impressed with the strangeness of it all (especially, as Donna says, since her own efforts to travel had ended up being a bog-standard coach trip in Egypt, where nothing much special at all had happened, no matter how much she'd intended otherwise).

However, Donna's interest is really piqued when Rose gets around to explaining her part in the most recent alien invasion ("You've been watchin' out for alien activity and you still missed seein' the giant purple space rhinos right in the middle of the city?" she asks Donna incredulously).

"Who's this Jack, then?" Donna asks. "That's the third time you've mentioned him. Have you got a little something going on there?"

Rose thinks she's probably not supposed to go about spilling the beans about Jack's Torchwood operation, but honestly, the way she hears it, it's not as if they're particularly circumspect themselves. Anyway, this is Donna, who's probably had about as close contact with aliens as anyone involved in Torchwood.

"They sound like the Ghostbusters," is Donna's only real comment on Torchwood, "only even less effective."

Donna whistles a very different tune, though, when Rose finally digs out the picture she knows is still stuffed away in her wallet somewhere of herself, the Doctor and Jack. She's glad that Donna completely bypasses asking who the third man is after Rose has pointed Jack out; Rose doesn't want to have to even think about the prospect of regeneration when she knows that just about anything could be happening to the Doctor out there without anyone about to help him. He's always needed someone, however much he might try to deny it. Rose bitterly thinks that the Master hardly counts, since he's more likely to hurt the Doctor and help heal him, if it comes to that.

"I know you and the Doctor are always mooning over each other like a couple of shy thirteen year olds," Donna says, "but more than ever now I'm wondering why? If you had one like this on the line, you should've given twig-man the shrug ages ago."

"Jack's so not 'on the line'," Rose says, flushing. She doesn't add that he might well be if only Rose ever really indicated that she was interested. For one thing, explaining Jack to Donna – to anyone, really – would take far longer than they have standing in the middle of a shopping centre with the stores not long from closing. For another, Rose isn't even sure if it's true anymore. She's never met Ianto, or seen Jack with him, but she still gets the impression that Jack's more serious about him than she'd have expected he would be. She thinks Jack's maybe more serious about him than Jack expected, as well.

"Maybe he should be," Donna says. "You sound a lot more like the girl I remember meeting when you're talking about him than you do going on about the rest of it."

Rose knows that's true. Even if it's not quite the same way the Doctor does, Jack brings out in her the adventurer, and the alien fighter, and they work well together (again, not the same way as with the Doctor, but as well as the two of them had before Satellite Five, at least).

She's run away from it for long enough that Rose has started thinking, since she parted company with Jack just a few days earlier, that maybe she's come full circle after all. Maybe she can still be the same girl away from the Doctor as she was when she was with him, and it won't mean that either she's moved on or is stuck pretending that everything around her is the same as it was.

It doesn't escape Rose that it takes Donna a grand total of half an hour talking about it to figure out something Rose is still mulling over after a year.

The train to Cardiff is delayed for hours and hours. Jack's I-told-you-so expression when she turns up is very nearly annoying enough that she doesn't notice the relief that underlies it. The Torchwood base is cold and cavernous in a very different (and much less welcome) way than the TARDIS had been.

Yet Jack smiles at her, and his team (which is smaller than she'd expected, she's got to admit) greet her like an old friend, and so none of these things are enough to make her sorry in the least that she's finally come.

It's only when the 456 leaves, and Jack is left a shell of himself with seemingly no one to help him drag himself back from the brink of what would have been heavy suicidal tendencies for any other man, that Rose realises what's she's been trying not to consider for months.

The Doctor might truly be dead.

She can't imagine anything less – not even his commitment to looking after the Master – that could have kept him from helping them through this.

She glares across the room at the damned carry-all bag, which hadn't helped at all with Jack's situation. It had never been anything like a replacement for the Doctor's presence, of course, but she feels the lack more than ever now.

So does Jack, obviously.

Rose clutches at Jack the way she knows he needs her to. Like the Doctor, sometimes he needs someone to stop him. She ignores the deep scratches in the skin of her forearms she's certain he doesn't even know he's making as he tries to yank himself violently out of her grasp.

His anger at her is really just an extension of the much greater hatred he's feeling for himself right now, she reminds herself. It's hardly as if she hasn't seen that sort of thing before.

She wonders, then, if dealing with the Doctor when he was fresh out of the Time War might have been the universe's way of training her for this. The Doctor might have sacrificed countless members of his own race, but this now with Jack is so much more immediate and personal that Rose can't help but think the Doctor's pain back when she met him was somehow less than this. The Doctor had at least presumably had time to heal from that long before he met her, even if that healing had been anything but complete.

Gwen tries to help her to help Jack, but she can't really do much when Jack announces that he has to get out of Cardiff. Gwen's got other commitments that keep her there, after all. Family. Rose understands that, even if she'd once put someone else above her family.

In the end, she probably wouldn't be much help anyway. It's not as though Gwen actually has any better grasp on what would be of any use than Rose does.

In the end, Rose just does what she can. She refuses to let Jack just up and leave Earth – and her – behind. Instead, she bargains with him enough that he limits his destructive drinking and brawling to the rowdier-looking pubs they come across in their travels. When Britain doesn't prove extreme enough for what Jack is apparently looking for, Rose just buys their tickets and gets on the train beside him without so much as a word or a curious look sent his way. It's not of much consequence to her whether they're in her home country or halfway across Europe. She's living out of a suitcase and surviving on dodgy pub food eaten off counters sticky with dried beer either way.

In Romania, Jack gets himself killed three times on three consecutive nights. The last time is by the same group of people who killed him the second night, who Rose can see are clearly under the impression that they'd finished the job the first time around until the moment that Jack appears before them like an angry spirit. She can't understand a word they're shouting, but she'll just bet from the way they recover from their shock and surge towards Jack that the hadn't meant to leave their victim to bear witness against them. This time around they really go to town on him, just to be sure.

Rose knows it's stupid, because no matter how hurt Jack gets he'll be all right again after a while, but she reacts before she can stop herself. She finds herself trying to intervene to prevent him suffering any more of that bone-shattering agony that's causing him to scream that way. It's instinctual. The Doctor, had he been there, might have told her that a lot of human instinct is most definitely stupidity. His absence at that moment, and what she's becoming ever-more certain it might mean, nearly hurts more than their boots crunching her bones. Nearly.

When Rose wakes up in what she's surprised anyone dares to actually call a 'hospital' – though she thinks that the fact that she's woken up at all should in itself really fill her surprise quota for the rest of the decade – Jack is crying for the first time since Steven and Ianto died. It's the first time Rose has ever seen him cry at all, actually. Rose thinks that some of the catalyst behind those tears has to do with her and what she's just barely lived through because of him, but a lot of it is backlogged from not having dealt with those deaths as well. Most of it, though, is probably for Jack himself; for both what he's done and what a mess he's let himself become since.

Rose wonders whether girls who grew up with a father, or brothers, or even just dating boys who don't have over-inflated egos like Jimmy Stone, have a better idea than she does of how to handle a crying man. She doubts it, somehow. Not when the man in question is as one-of-a-kind as Jack Harkness, anyway.

It hurts a lot, and Rose isn't entirely sure movement is great for her stitches given the way her skin feels like it's pulling, but none of that stops her from looping her arms around Jack and holding him throughout the wracking convulsions, her shoulder quickly growing cold and wet.

She thinks she falls asleep like that, despite the discomfort, but perhaps she merely passes out.

They don't travel back to Britain anywhere near as quickly and purposefully as they'd shot away from it, owing to just how badly Rose is still injured over a week later. As soon as she's deemed to be fit for travel by the doctor, whose opinion Rose isn't entirely certain she trusts, Jack gets them to Germany as quickly as her state allows. The hospital he checks her into there is almost scary, it's so clean and well organised. Jack's convinced himself that she'll get better much more quickly there. Rose can't help but think he's probably right, considering the vast difference from where she'd been. It doesn't mean she enjoys the constant sound of German being spoken in the hallways, to her, outside the window, everywhere. In Romania the hospital staff had pretty much left her alone, but here they seemed to always be there, talking and talking without drawing breath. She's almost certain she wouldn't be so put off by how guttural the language sounds if only she could understand a single word of it. She'd always known that choosing to take French in school was a mistake. Not that she'd paid much attention to those lessons either, of course.

It comes down to the fact that Rose misses the translation of the TARDIS. She might never have opportunity to have that inside her head again, and on that horrifying thought can hardly believe how she'd protested it at first.

She asks Jack to translate everything he can understand of what those around them are saying, trying to pretend that it's in any way the same.

Baby steps, Rose thinks. That's what it seems like they're taking in their trip back to Britain. She's not really any more bothered by the idea of being elsewhere than she'd been back when Jack had first made the decision to flee full-pelt across the continent. That doesn't mean that she's not frustrated by how obvious it is that the only reason they're taking so long to travel in these tiny spurts is because Jack's clearly still worried for her.

She's fine. She's told him that. And unlike the pain after the Doctor left her, she's mostly recovered from this more physical pain, so she really is fine. It's not just a lie. Mostly.

Rose doesn't complain too much, though, when Jack's inclination leads them to Greece. Rose suns herself on the shore of the Mediterranean, modestly clothed in shorts and a shirt so that she can pretend the noticeably thick scar that still shines red across her ribs doesn't exist. Jack tries to ply her with a tiny little bikini that Rose doubts would actually cover anything, promising with that grin of his to rub the sunscreen onto her back (and anywhere else she'd like, he adds).

Rose thinks that that's a good sign that, despite everything, things between the two of them will be all right. She'd missed the way Jack's personality could be that kind of forceful, as opposed to just plain violent.

Rose adjusts her sunglasses against the brightness of the light beaming down on her as she ruffles through her bag, determined to find out whether the Doctor thought to pack super-strength sunscreen for her. The bag still has so many secrets. Rose doesn't know if she'll ever even find everything that the Doctor left for her in there, let alone actually figure out all of the ways to use it all. She's just been pulling things out and pressing buttons at random, really, as a means of determining the purpose of everything. She thinks that that might've been seriously dangerous in other circumstances, but the Doctor would've known that Rose couldn't help herself, so she doubts that he's packed anything that's going to blow up in her face as a result of her haphazard curiosity.

Rose discovers, on that beach looking out on a perfect blue ocean, that randomly pressing buttons is perhaps about the best thing she could've done, actually. As she uncovers a new device – the only one with a note attached to it, which simply reads 'if necessary' – Rose pushes the sole button on it and something that's an even more perfect shade of blue appears as if on command.

That still-familiar sound makes Rose and Jack turn to each other with wide eyes.

If only the Doctor had told her about that button, Rose thinks for a moment, before whatever despair she's feeling melts away into pure joy.

The sight of the man who steps out of the familiar blue box surprises Rose just as much as the sudden appearance of the TARDIS itself. After so long wondering and worrying, and having so much reason to think something had happened to him, Rose hadn't expected to see him again at all (though she'd still hoped, of course). Never, though, would she have anticipated that he wouldn't at the very least have run through a few more regenerations if he did eventually return.

She considers for a split-second what she should say to him first (why had she never thought about how to greet him if she saw him again?). For a mad moment she nearly bursts out with, "I pulled a rabbit out of a bigger-on-the-inside hat for a living and got into a fist-fight with a gang of Romanian bikers," – of all things, honestly – but the words die when she really gets a proper look at him.

Maybe the Doctor hasn't regenerated, but Rose is quick to realise that it would be wrong to say that he looks like the same man. She can hardly believe that this haggard man used to grin like a maniac, seemingly without a care, as he ran and laughed alongside her.

He's older, she can tell. A lot older. And even though he's always been damaged since she met him, this is an all new level. He looks horrible, even if he's the best thing Rose has seen in a whole year and a half.

He looks so terrible that Rose can't even imagine how, even with the signal that the device put out to follow, he managed to steer the TARDIS towards the right solar system, let alone to exactly where she and Jack were waiting. Perhaps he didn't. Perhaps the TARDIS took it upon herself to get him here. It wouldn't be the first time the ship determined the destination with little or no input from him.

When he sees her, the Doctor's squint against the sunlight widens into an odd mixture of recognition and (if she's not mistaken) desperation bordering on near-madness. He stumbles towards her like that, as if he's using his last scrap of energy just to get to her, no matter what.

Rose spares him the effort, and closes the distance herself. For the first time in a very long time, Rose runs off without her bag without giving it a second thought.

Jack barely lags behind her. Rose doesn't even have to look at him to know that he's just as ready as she is to spring into action – to help, as they both wish they'd been allowed to do all along.

The fact that the last time they saw this man he was purposely leaving them behind (and not for the first time for either of them) doesn't matter right now. They have to help him.

Rose doesn't even know what's happened to him. At least she's always known precisely why Jack looks like he's been through seventeen different wars in the last week alone. The Doctor...

Rose considers this time, when she's called upon yet again to help one of the people she loves, that perhaps it's not a case of one thing training for her for the next after all, but rather the universe throwing progressively more difficult tasks at her, testing how much weight she can take before she breaks right along with those she's trying desperately to hold above water. After all, the first time she was helping the Doctor all she really had to do was be herself. This time she has no idea what the hell he needs.

It's just as well, then, that he obviously knows.

He reaches for her, and his lips form the word, "Please," even though no noise actually emits from them.

Rose hasn't a clue what he's asking for, but there's really only one answer to it. "Anything you need," is what she says when she means 'I love you', but the words come to the same thing in the end. Besides, even though she knows it's ridiculous that they've been through all of this and she still hasn't voiced that sentiment aloud, she knows that this isn't really the time.

She vows, though, that there will be a time. She'd damn near convinced herself that she'd never see him again. Now that he's here, within touching distance, she's not going to let things just slip through the cracks out of fear and uncertainty again.

The pads of the Doctor's fingertips slide in tandem to each of Rose's temples and pause there. Then he throws himself at her without physically moving a muscle.

It hurts just enough to make her gasp, having the Doctor barrel into her mind. At least that's what she thinks he's doing. It feels more like he's become her mind, it's such a complete takeover. That doesn't just mean pain, though. It means that she feels as if she's right there in his mind as well, like they're part of one thing. Maybe they are. From what she can actually understand of what she's witnessing (she can't quite call this sense 'seeing', for it feels nothing like something she'd do with her eyes), he might just be damaged enough that he's not a whole person on his own right now.

It's lucky she can sense bits and pieces of him. Lucky because she quickly knows why he's so utterly frayed, or at least part of it. He's spent far too much time in the Master's mind trying to heal him. Decades, at least, of near-constant delving into each other's thoughts and becoming hopelessly entangled, even battling each other mentally when the Master's nature would no longer allow him to sit through the Doctor's mercies passively. Rose thinks at first the result of this is that the Doctor's been driven insane by the Master's drums, or whatever they really are. That's not it, though. Those decades upon decades, the Doctor has never really been alone in his own head for more than moments. Rose can feel, through the Doctor's own perception, how it was different than the much less personal way he could feel the Time Lords from a distance before they'd all died. This was something so pervasive that now, with the loss of it, it's as if he's been hacked in half, instead of as if a tiny piece of him has been torn away.

Because, of course, Rose can feel more powerfully than anything that that other presence is wholly and irreversibly lost.

The Master is dead. Properly dead, with no regenerations to come. That, she thinks, explains a lot.

Rose doesn't think that it could be the same for the Doctor to be inside her mind as it was for him to be inside the Master's. Human minds can't possibly be as complex and all-encompassing as she can practically remember, through the Doctor, the Master's mind being. But then, Rose thinks that that might be a good thing. The Doctor has only snapped like this because of how suddenly that lack of anyone else there in his mind with him came. Having a lesser sort of contact might be like an intermediate step to relearning how to survive on his own.

She has to help him do that, no matter what. She's as certain as she's ever been that the Doctor truly cares for her and trusts her to be right there with him – he sought her out, after all, not just any old person on that beach who'd consent to him entering their mind, and not even Jack either. However, Rose knows that that can't last forever. He's far too wilful to be content being truly dependent on anyone, even her, for long.

She'll help him get back to being that infuriatingly stubborn man, she thinks. She has to.

She hates to have to leave him when he needs her, but there's really no choice. She has basic needs to attend to, like eating, and she doesn't think it likely that she'll do him much good if she falls unconscious from low blood-sugar. Which isn't to say that he isn't fully capable of following her into her dreams (which she thinks would probably have been much more embarrassing had he been considerably more coherent at the time, from what she remembers of the content of those dreams). Still, the point stands. Jack – who neither of them is really aware of most of the time, but who at some point dragged them into the TARDIS and has since then done his best to look after them – can't be around all the time to wait hand and foot on them. Also, there are certain things a girl just has to do on her own.

Still, she hates those few times a day that she has to separate herself from the Doctor, when she has to witness that look of pain and loss all over again.

She takes heart, though, that each time he looks as if he handles it just a little better.

There comes a day, finally, when she returns from her shower and the Doctor doesn't immediately latch himself to her like a drowning man might launch himself at a life vest. Not the same way he has been, at least. He's quick to pull her still-damp body close, though, which seems strangely more intimate at that moment than having him inside her mind has ever been. The two of them stay that way for over an hour (or so she thinks – time has always seemed to slip away when the two of them are together) before the Doctor finally caves in and touches her temples again, stitching their minds back together.

It's slow-going, but it's still progress. It's certainly more than she could have hoped for, given that at one stage she didn't even think she'd ever see him again.

The first time the Doctor speaks out loud, it's just so very him that Rose immediately knows that somehow things are going to be all right, even if it's still going to take more time before they get there. And even if she sort of wants to beat him over the head with his sonic screwdriver for being ridiculous.

"So..." the Doctor says. His voice sounds rough from lack of use. "You and Jack, then?"

Rose pivots within the circle of his arms and just stares, incredulous, fighting to prevent her eyes from crossing from focusing on him when his face is so close to hers. "Weeks of not sayin' a word, and that's what you come up with?" she asks.

The Doctor looks uncomfortable, and still so very tired. "You look... well, I thought, or figured, really... it was little bit surprising, though, seeing him be so attentive... not that he shouldn't! Or you shouldn't. Or you both shouldn't. Perfectly decent bloke, Jack Harkness, when he wants to be. So he'd say, anyway. I sometimes had my..." He clears his throat. "Anyway. Makes sense, you two together. You look like you fit. I've seen the way he looks at you when he comes in. He cares about you."

She recalls that he's always been a bit of a babbler, but this seems extreme even for him. She hopes that it's just a product of presumably living so long without speech, and not a more permanent change. She's always had enough trouble understanding him and keeping up with him as it is.

She certainly doesn't understand this reaction, or the Doctor's blindness. Rose will just bet that Jack looks at the Doctor in much the same way as the Doctor claims he looks at her, and the Doctor just fails to notice (or purposely ignores it, perhaps). Honestly. Rose doesn't know whether to laugh or cry or just shout at him. She settles on a matter-of-fact tone, thinking it's probably safest all around.

"You're way too damn noble," she says. "And you're a martyr. And you're stupid."

"I'm a genius," the Doctor protests. He says those words, unlike the ones that came before them, with something like the old cockiness that she knows she's remembering as more than just a false recollection from a year and a half of sometimes inaccurate dreams about him.

"Yep," Rose agrees. "You're a genius. And you're also so very, very stupid. Jack reckons it's possible that you can be both, since you're such a complex guy and all."

"Jack's a smart man, it seems," the Doctor muses.

"And a stupid man," Rose adds. She shrugs. "He's a complex guy too. Not my complex guy, though. Not like that."

Not like you, she thinks. She'll just bet that goes over his head as well. He's been in her mind pretty much non-stop, and somehow he still fails to see what's right there in front of him? She restrains the urge to roll her eyes.

The Doctor quirks an eyebrow. The sight makes Rose want to smile. "Well good," he says. "By the sounds of it, you really should watch out for those 'complex guys'. They sound like a dangerous bunch."

"I do," Rose says quietly, suddenly serious. "I always watch out for them, whether they let me or not."

The silence hangs for a time, filled with the weight of things unsaid, but Rose is having none of that. Not anymore.

For once she's glad that Jack's not hanging about ready to help out. This is something she'd rather do without an audience, if that's at all possible.

The Doctor's tie is so hopelessly askew even before she touches it that it brings to mind just how long he must have been in that same outfit, uncaring of his appearance. Rose balls up that tie in her fist and uses it to firmly pull him even closer than they're already sitting. The Doctor hesitates, then grimaces as his resistance makes the tie tug at the back of his neck.

"That's actually attached to me you know," he says wryly. "And I don't think choking to death is my favoured way to move on to the next body."

Rose might have relinquished her hold on the tie, then, except that the Doctor says all of that with something approaching a pout crossing his mouth. She can't quite take him seriously when he's giving her a look like that, and she doesn't really think that he means for her to take him at his word just now.

"Then maybe you'll just have to not pull away," Rose suggests. If he really wants to get free, she decides, then she's hardly going to make him stay against his will. Though her hold on the slick material of his tie is firm, she'll break it in a heartbeat if necessary. If that's what he wants. Really, though, she doesn't think that's what either of them wants. Or needs, at that.

When Rose pulls again, more gently this time, the Doctor seems to zero in on her lower lip by his own design rather than through the mere cause-and-effect of being pulled towards her. She knows at that moment that she's been proved right about him being just as willing in this as she is, because it doesn't feel as if there could possibly be anything out there in the universe that either of them needs more than this.

She smiles into the kiss.

~FIN~