By: Lilac Summers
Rating: PG, angstorama
Characters: 10.5, Rose, Donna (sort of)

AN: So this is part of a series, begun with "Destroyer of Worlds." It switches point of view (somewhat confusingly, sorry!) from Duplicate 10 to Rose in the very last paragraphs. It's my gearing up for a fix-it. Consider this Prologue #2. (Oh, and yes, I know 10.5 wears a t-shirt but work with me here! ;D )

Sequel to prologue 1: "Destroyer of Worlds"

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Although he knew what was coming it's still a shock to find himself on a windy beach in the Norway of a parallel world, hearing the TARDIS fade for the last time.

Rose huddles by his side, cold in her thin leather jacket as the freezing breeze comes off the ocean. It's a stunningly beautiful beach in its bleakness. He draws Rose in closer to his side, automatically puts an arm around her in a bid to warm her with this new body that he's trying to get used to. She burrows gratefully.

He continues to stare at where the TARDIS stood.

They sit side by side in the back of a black all-terrain vehicle. He's gripping Rose's hand painfully tight, but if it's hurting her she doesn't protest. There's been nothing but silence between them since he whispered those words in her ear and she touched her lips to his.

Words she deserved to hear. Words he might have even meant...years ago.

Something in him – his heart? that strange, lone organ – clenches tight, makes it hard to breathe. He forces air in and out of his lungs (no bypass now) and realizes, dimly, this is what a panic attack feels like. This is what it's like to be human.

But he wants so much for Rose to be happy. And if this...if his being here is what it takes, then maybe it's the right price to pay.

He's not important, anyway. After all, she never spoke up when they decided to leave him, a piece of coral his only link

He grips Rose's hand even tighter. Rose casts him one quick, nervous glance and then adjusts her hand, threads her fingers through his and grips back just as tight.

Maybe, he tells himself, this hand can be his new anchor. Maybe with some work he can make everything real. He can build on the memories of how much Rose used to mean. There's a base of affection and wanting to see her smile – he can make this work because she deserves it and she tried so hard to reach him. Well, not him... the other him, but he can be that too, if that's what she needs.

He tries very hard to ignore how the hand he's clutching in his feels wrong. He still has memories of longer fingers and brightly-painted nails curving over his knuckles.

But that touch is far away; he tucks the memory aside in the same box where his loss of the TARDIS goes, and then struggles through another round of deep breathing as panic hits again. There's a hole, a gnawing void left in him that he cannot live around - he must fill it with something.

He pulls Rose closer and she slides willingly toward him on the the black leather seat. She moves easily under his right arm and although he remembers well how simply Rose fit at his side, he's still startled by how small she feels. His body was braced for someone taller.

Yet there is hope here, he argues with himself. Feelings are malleable and even more so in humans. Time – oh, the irony of it – heals all wounds for them because it has to. Their lives are too short for the luxury of endless grief. He will forget because he has no choice; he will make himself forget and that's that.

Moping, a voice in his head chides, whisper-soft and feminine and teasing, and he smiles before the pain hits again in his fragile human heart and the void in him yawns wide and horrible.

Rose snuggles deeper, tucks her head under his chin. He drops a kiss on her hair reflexively and ignores that her hair smells wrong, too.

1.08 hours after he'd been abandoned on a beach, they reach the old manor that Pete keeps in Norway. It's from here, he learns, that Rose spent years building and testing the cannon once the stars started fading and she realized she had to get to him. It's been 3 years for him and closer to 7 for her as time runs differently here.

Jackie and Pete have left them to their own devices, too preoccupied with each other and their little boy to pay much attention to how a displaced human-Time Lord may be settling in.

Rose asks him if he's hungry and he shakes his head in a silent negative. He is being too quiet and probably not making this any easier on her, but he can't do anything more just yet. They stare at each other in a foyer made of stone as the shrill wind howls outside lead windows. He wracks his brain for something Doctorish to say when the silence gets to be too much, until Rose takes pity on him and snags his hand to lead him up a gracefully winding staircase, down a long hall and finally into what he assumes is her room.

His eyes are instantly drawn to the bed – a wide expanse of dove-gray sheets and comforters, a pile of pillows.

Rose and he were never intimate, in his many inherited memories. They hadn't been anywhere close to that, though Rose probably had not realized that. The Doctor never did take intimacy lightly, with Gallifreyan mating rituals taken much more slowly and seriously than human ones. Perhaps...perhaps if Rose had never been ripped away, if all those years in between had never occurred and if another bride had not entered the TARDIS – then the love based on affection and dependence and gratitude that had filled the Doctor's hearts would have morphed into something different, something deeper and stronger that would have led into the sexual realm the human girl had so obviously expected.

But he's not an immortal Time Lord like the other Doctor, and he has his human-side's knowledge about what's expected after several years of separation between two humans who claim to love each other. It's been even longer for Rose, building up in her mind how their reunion should be.

As he's been doing for the (1.37) hours since he was left standing on that cold, bleak sand, he repeats the mantra that is keeping him sane: Rose deserves to be happy.

It's what keeps his expression calm as she turns around to face him. She looks up at him uncertainly, her brown eyes wide.

When she raises up on tiptoes to press her lips to his, he obligingly lowers his head and softens his lips, kisses her back. It's a short kiss (it does not taste of ginger and walnuts) and when she breaks away her eyes never leave his, full of unspoken questions he can't decipher.

He smiles down at her reassuringly, though. She takes heart from this and reaches up slowly, touches his cheek as if to make sure he's there, then trails that hand down his throat, to the knot of his tie, to the buttons of his jacket. She flicks them open and he doesn't stop her.

She casts her eyes up once more, finds nothing in his face that directs her either way other than that soft smile that hasn't budged. He's making sure that smile doesn't falter for her.

And her gaze, so unsure at first, hardens just slightly with determination before she lowers her eyes again, back to fingers that are now tugging on his tie, working on the first, then second, then third and fourth buttons of his shirt until she bares him completely and she can place a warm human hand on his warm human skin.

Her other hand is skimming down, tracing his stomach, reaching his trousers and working his belt loose. She pauses there, fingers poised at his waistband.

He holds himself very still.

But when Rose looks back up at him, one hand solid upon his chest and another faltering at his waist, the tears that glitter in her eyes are completely unexpected.

"Aren't you going to stop me?" she asks tightly.

"Why would I?" he murmurs, confused.

She steps back, pulls her hands from him and uses them to press at her eyes, ensuring the tears don't fall.

"Oh, I don't know," she drawls through a voice thickened by grief, "because you don't want this? Because you're not the Doctor who should be standing here with me. He should." She turns abruptly so all he can see are her trembling shoulders.

"Rose," he implores, standing with buttons undone and completely out of his depth. "Look at me. Please."

He waits patiently for her to turn and finally she does. She's valiantly held the tears at bay, but her face is so vulnerable. Still so young, even after all these years and all she's seen and done. He takes her hand between his because at least that should be familiar to her.

"I am the Doctor. I'm made of every memory and every emotion he's ever had. I'm him in every way that matters."

She watches him for long moments before she pulls her fingers from his and steps closer, placing that same hand once more upon his chest, over his human heart.

"Maybe you have all of that. But you also have more," she says quietly. "You have something of Donna."

He flinches at the name, the one he has been very careful not to mention, even to himself, since they landed on that cold beach.

But Rose is expecting an answer, and so he gives it. "The human spark," he explains. "A bit of life force to bind it all together. And the human perspective: a better understanding of what humans – we," he corrects himself, "need."

He doesn't mention that beyond that he managed (fought, in truth) to keep a spark of her. That he knows she loves nothing more than a lemon ice on hot days. That her red hair is so heavy her arms ache after 20 minutes of blow drying. He knows her feet get cold at night but she hates sleeping with socks on; she sometimes misses sharing her bed with someone solely for the advantage of warming her toes on them. He knows she secretly likes pink but refuses to wear it because of her coloring. He knows she thinks the best chocolates – out of all of time and space – are still the cheap, gooey squares they sell at the corner store by her home in Chiswick, and on the TARDIS she fought over the chocolate biscuits not because they were her favorite, as she claimed, but because it tickled her how he always put up such a fight over the last one before invariably handing it over to her.

He knows now that she sometimes went into his bedroom on the rare nights that he slept, and when he'd have nightmares she'd sit at his bedside and hold his hand until he quieted. He knows that one night in his sleep he called out all the names of his past companions, in order, and she memorized them because she thought someone besides the Doctor should remember them all. Then she wondered if anyone would ever remember her name when she was gone.

Rose's hand is a loose fist now and she taps it gently against him. "You told me you loved me, when he never could before."

He knows all these things, and that sometimes you lie because it's the kindest thing to do...

"Yes," he whispers hoarsely.

"And do you mean it?" she begs plaintively. "Does he mean it, but just can't say it?"

He feels that inability to breathe again – there's something strangling him and he can't get the words he thinks he should say out.

"Doctor?"

And the last thing he knows, and he knows it only in her voice because the Doctor never had qualms about lying is: ...but most times people deserve the truth more than a kind lie.

"He used to," he chokes out. In his own, flawed way.

Rose's eyes fill and overflow at the past tense and she bites her lip in that way he remembers so well. Her fist on his chest tightens; he can almost feel the urge she has to lash out. He wishes she would, he knows how well he deserves it. But she doesn't and instead smooths out her hand to lay flat once more before moving away.

"I knew that," she admits quietly. "He knew that and he couldn't...The coward."

"Rose..."

"No! Listen! I'm not a child that needs to placated."

"I've never thought you were."

"But you treat me as if I am! You and, and him making decisions about people, for people. Do you think I'm an idiot? Do you think I didn't figure it out immediately?"

"What?" he asks softly.

"That he would have asked me to stay if he wanted me! It wasn't for my sake that he left me here; I was ready to go, I had said my goodbyes. All of," she broke off, made a grand gesture with her hand that included him, the room, the world, "all of this was unnecessary. All he had to do was ask me to stay!"

She takes a deep breath, but her sudden anger crumbles and then she simply looks at him with such loneliness and beseeching that it makes him ache in turn. Her next words seem torn out of her.

"But he didn't. And it's you, instead, standing here, ready to do whatever I want, whatever I need. It was you who said you loved me."

She steps in, drops her forehead on his chest. He brings his arms around her tentatively.

"Do you?" she reminds him, repeating the question he didn't answer before, voice so low he has to strain to hear. "Do you mean it?"

"I..." It's the kind lie, he knows, that he should say. It can still all be saved if he simply says 'yes.' But in the end all he can strangle out is, "I'm the Doctor."

It's an obtuse way of saying what he's said before: whatever the Doctor had felt was done. Past tense. Rose doesn't need it spelled out for her; she tenses in his arms and he feels his own tears prick his eyes at his absolute failure at being what she needs.

He's bollocksed this up so badly, the only thing the other Doctor asked of him. His arms tighten around Rose and he buries his face in her hair, clinging by his fingertips to the only thing he can say truthfully, the only purpose left to him now. "I just want you to be happy!" he cries.

"Because he wants me to be happy," she clarifies dully. He nods, jerkily. And though she doesn't look up, she can sense the movement.

"And who wants you to be happy?" she whispers.

He says nothing to that, and that's answer enough.

They stand that way for a while, both of them weary and defeated, until she finally lets go and steps back, dutifully doing up his buttons again. Belt, Shirt, tie, jacket. When she's done she turns and walks away until she reaches her wardrobe. She opens the door and then, to his utter confusion, roots around until she finds whatever she's looking for. It's small enough that she can hold it in one hand, fingers curled over, and he can't see what it is. She finally turns, walks back to him and faces him with tears still overflowing but a smile on her face all the same.

And it's so very Rose that he has to smile back, because he remembers that about Rose so well: her ability to smile through her tears. It was that ability that brought him through very dark times in the beginning.

"I do."

He startles at the unexpected words, spoken in a strong, firm voice by Rose. "You do what?"

"I want you to be happy."

He stares at her, mute.

"I watched you. The three of you. You, the Doctor, and Donna."

He can't help the flinch, again, at her name and Rose, who is watching him very closely, sees it.

"You all looked happy. I knew it then, how it would play out. But I guess I also wanted...hope." She shrugs self-consciously. "I had waited so long. Maybe I was selfish."

"No, Rose. You deserve it. You deserve whatever you want."

"That's the Doctor talking. And he's not standing here, is he?"

"I am the Doctor. I want what he wants."

"So you keep saying. And if that's the case...then we both know what – who – the Doctor wants."

He looks away, ashamed, until she snags his hand and places the last thing he expects into it.

A vortex manipulator, set to follow the biological signature of the TARDIS.

"This will get you through the closing rift; there's still a little bit of time. It wouldn't work for me – the TARDIS wouldn't link to my biological signature to pull me through. But with the piece of coral and you being you, it might work. Once."

His hand clenches convulsively around the device and his heart pounds furiously. He tries to speak but nothing passes his lips until he swallows several times.

Rose watches him gather his wits, wondering what he will say, and when the words finally leave his lips they are so edged with guilt and hope, all scrambled up, that she feels it like a punch to the belly.

"Oh, Rose. You don't have to do this. I...I would stay, if you would have me."

"I don't want you here," she says bluntly, and he recoils at the words. "If the Doctor really wanted to make me happy, he just had to ask me to stay. I won't have you here as some sort of sacrificial lamb. I'm sorry, but I won't be forced on anyone like a second prize. And I'm an adult, something you, both of you, seem to forget. I don't let people make decisions for me now, either."

He drops his gaze back to the manipulator, then up to her. She reads the want fighting with the should so clearly that it makes her want to sob.

"I need you to go, Doctor," she finally bites out, giving him that final push she senses is required.

He hangs his head, in defeat or relief or both, now she can't tell but she doesn't want to know anyway. She takes the device from his limp fingers and quickly straps it to his wrist, before she loses her nerve and begs him to stay, instead.

So here they are, finally, at the edge of a parallel universe, the Doctor and Rose Tyler holding hands for what will be the last time. He tugs her close and she wraps her arms around him, wondering how it is that this could be ending so differently than she imagined. But when she breathes him in there's a scent of something she doesn't recognize, a bit of jasmine perfume that clings to his clothing, lingering still from when he left Donna's side. And she knows this is the only thing that's fair to all of them.

"You're not the same as the Doctor, you know. You're better," she whispers in his ear, her tears soaking into the blue of his coat.

"I'm th-"

"You're not," she cuts off his protests, "because, regardless of what you wanted, you were willing to stay. For me. And he never was."

She burrows deeper, committing the feel of him to memory, before finally disentangling herself from him.

"Be happy, Doctor," Rose smiles. "Because I will be, too."

And she presses the button for him.

to be continued...in the TARDIS