Rose sat on the jump seat, legs curled to the side as she paged through an issue of New Vogue. After they had dropped off the silimagnetoform primordium on a planet with the right conditions for their species to grow and begin anew, the Doctor had put them into the vortex and immersed himself beneath the grating, insisting he had a terrible backlog of repairs. So, after a long nap, Rose had settled herself in for a lazy day in the vortex.

Rose snuck glances at the Doctor tinkering beneath the console as she perused her magazine. She found herself cataloguing his movements, how when the TARDIS groaned he would frown and rub the back of his neck, and how he would touch his tongue to the roof of his mouth and grin whenever she let out a pleased hum. It was in quiet moments like these that she had begun to notice how every so often his eyes would turn far away and he would swallow and take a breath, as if willing himself to carry on.

She had seen him like this before, when they first met, but after he had regenerated he had seemed much less burdened. It made her wonder what had happened since she left to dampen his spirits in this way.

She wondered if it had something to do with the Ood's mysterious message. If they were summoning him and he was ignoring them, he must have his reasons. The Doctor was no coward. Yet, she had a sneaking suspicion that that there was much more to this story, which meant she would have to approach the matter delicately.

She was just examining a line of skirts meant to make one's tail look its most attractive when the sound of irritated words voiced in Gallifreyan erupted from beneath the console.

She jumped down and crouched down next to the hole in the grating where the Doctor was enmeshed in wires, a headlamp falling over his eyes.

"Need some help down there?"

"No, I—" There was a loud clanging noise followed by a staccato stream of Gallifreyan. "Actually, could you hand me the gyric spectrometer? It's the one with the spr—"

She interrupted him by dangling the instrument in question in front of his nose.

"Right. Yes." He grinned up at her briefly, scratching the back of his neck.

She sat down crossed-legged on the grating, peering down at his handiwork.

"Is that a chronal harmonizer of some sort?" she asked, pointing to a red sphere with rabbit ears. "Why do you have it connected to the gravimetric anomalizer? I mean, you might be able to end up in the right time if your materialization circuits are in good order, but good luck steering to the correct spacial coordinates."

The Doctor's eyes widened, staring up at her in surprise. "I—" He glanced down at the machinery he'd been tinkering with and his face broke into a wide grin. "That—that should solve the issue I've been having! Now I just need to recalibrate the paradox inhibitor and we'll be ready to go! Hand me that Simian wrench, will you?"

She handed him the instrument, and they worked together for a long while, her handing him tools and asking him questions about the TARDIS's inner workings, and he gladly expounding upon the uses of its various components.

"Where did you learn so much about temporal mechanics?" he asked her finally, glancing up briefly before returning his gaze to the gravimetric anomalizer.

She remained silent, not sure what explanation she might give that wouldn't give away too much. He let the silence hang for a minute before he spoke again.

"I learned at the Time Lord Academy," he said, tone casual. "Terrible place, really. I was never a very good student. Always aching to just get out of there."

Rose looked up. He almost never spoke of his life on Gallifrey.

"Wanted to see the universe?" she asked.

"That was a bit of it, yeah," he replied. "Though it was more that I wanted to run away." He paused a moment to take a wrench to a heavy bolt securing a panel of switches underneath the console.

"Run away?" Rose asked. "From Gallifrey?"

He nodded, remaining silent for a moment. When he opened his mouth again, words tumbled from his lips rapid-fire. "When we were inducted into the Academy, we were taken to look into the Untempered Schism. It's this enormous spacio-temporal fissure in the universe from which vortex energy leaks freely. Its presence on Gallifrey is what gives all Gallifreyans a better time sense than any other species in the universe. Before they are inducted into the Academy, children are taken to look into it, and those senses are heightened even further. It's also what gave them the ability to regenerate."

He glanced up at her. "I saw that terrible power and wanted to run as far away as I could. As I grew older, the urge only grew stronger. I never agreed with the code of my people—that we were to watch the course of history, but were never to interfere. I understood that I couldn't interfere with fixed points, of course, but when there were people out there hurting, and I could use my life to help…" He shrugged. "It became clear I didn't belong among my people quite early on. Gave me the logic to back up that urge to run, I suppose."

He turned silent, returning to his tinkering.

"And what are you running towards?" Rose asked him after a pause.

"What?" he asked, narrowing his eyes.

"Well, Gallifrey is gone now. At some point you must have started running towards something, Doctor. 900 years is a long time to keep running on without aim."

His movements paused. He tilted his head up, gazing at the TARDIS ceiling with his eyes far away. She had almost given up on getting an answer from him when he cleared his throat, running his hand through his hair and gazing down at his trainers.

"Home," he replied at long last. "I'm searching for a home."

"A home?" she asked. "The TARDIS is your home."

He shook his head. "She's an accomplice of sorts, an enabler. We run away together, she and I. Yes, she's the constant in my life, a place to lay my head down at night. But I meant a home in more of the figurative sense. As a place of belonging." He paused a long moment, sighing and running his hand through his hair. "As something that makes me want to stand still. That makes me feel like I even can, without being consumed by..." He shook his head, swallowing and looking away.

"But you must have come close at some point," Rose found herself insisting. "All of the planets you've saved, time and again. There must have been people who would have offered you a place among them."

"Offered, yes," he replied. "But it never felt right staying with any of them. Because I never would have belonged in those places. Not really."

"So you've never felt like you've belonged anywhere at all?"

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, remaining silent a long moment. "There was a woman," he told her. "We met just after the Time War. She had this heart, this..." He sighed, rubbing his eyes. "She could have compassion for a Dalek, Rose could."

Rose's heart leaped into her throat.

"I've travelled with a lot of people over the years," he continued, "but she…she—" He cleared his throat, looking away. "She was my..." He paused a long moment before shaking his head and returning his attention to his work. "Still, gone now."

Rose's heart raced, and she bit down on her bottom lip to stop its quivering. She closed her eyes, breathing out in an attempt to calm her tumbling thoughts.

"There was a man," she blurted. The story on the tip of her tongue felt like an excuse, an apology. "This wonderful man. He had this...time machine."

"Who taught you about temporal mechanics?" the Doctor clarified, glancing up and attempting to catch her eye. She raised her gaze to the time rotor, letting its up and down motion and the subtle hum of the ship lull her into a state of calm. She closed her eyes and breathed in, telling herself that it was just a story, the story of another woman from long ago.

"Not quite," she replied at last, keeping her eyes closed. The light clinking of the Doctor's tools came to an abrupt halt. "Though the story starts with him. Oh, he taught me a bit here and there about time travel—fixed points, how it's a bad idea to go back on your own timeline, that sort of thing. But mostly he showed me that there was a better way of living your life. That there was so much out there to see, so many people you could help.

"But one day he just…" She shook her head, closing her eyes against the tears she felt welling up. She took a deep breath. "One day he just disappeared. Before my very eyes. Never to return." Her voice broke, and she wiped her eyes. "God, I can't even think about it without breaking down. Just about killed me, it did."

She looked at him then, reminding herself that he was right there in front of her, though in a sense the two of them remained so far away from one another. He stared back at her with wide, bright eyes, a look of startled confusion on his face. He shook his head, and when he looked up again, the deepest kind of understanding filled his eyes. After a moment, he reached out and grasped her hand, tentatively at first, before turning it over and linking her fingers through his own.

"And you've been searching for him ever since?"

She sniffed. "At first I was. Devoted my life to building my own time travel device. Was dead determined to find my way back to him. But it's a funny thing, time, isn't it? It changes things. Destroys things. Because there were things that happened to me while we were apart, things I'm not sure I could ever tell him about." She paused. "Things I…things I couldn't bear for him to know about. I'm not sure I can be the woman I used to be for him."

The Doctor pulled himself up from beneath the grating to sit next to her. "There are things…" He cleared his throat. "After I lost—" He rubbed the back of his neck. "Things change. People…they change." He sighed, leaning backward on his palms and joining her in watching the time rotor. "One minute you're a brooding survivor and the next you can't get enough of life and the next you're ready to fling yourself in front of an army of Daleks just to get the pain to end.

"It's all a bit of a gamble, really, if people stay with you, even though you may become what feels like an entirely different person. If they're willing to be with you through and through. Sometimes it isn't even about you. Maybe you were only ever were just a lark to them. Or maybe you help them be a better version of themselves, a version that doesn't need you anymore. Even if they say they want to stay permanently, you have to wonder if one day they'll wake up and you won't be enough anymore, that they want different things, things that you can't give them."

Rose turned her head abruptly. The Doctor was gazing towards the TARDIS door like it held the key to his hearts' desires.

"You have so little faith in your companions?" Her mind flitted back to the promise of forever she had given him so long ago now, a promise she found herself realising, that she might just yet keep, if not as the same woman as she was when she made it.

The Doctor's smile was wistful as he took her hand and gazed down at their entwined fingers. "I find that I have far more faith in you than one could possibly measure, Iris Fletcher." He looked away, ducking his head.

She squeezed his hand, moving to lean her head on his shoulder. It felt like forever that they sat like that, the silence between them suffusing a peaceful contentment.

At long last, the Doctor cleared his throat. "How would you like to learn to fly the TARDIS?"

She smiled up at him, something sparking in her heart as she met his gaze. "I'd love to."

He made a happy noise in the back of his throat, jumping to his feet and offering her his hand. She pulled herself up and let him lead her to a specific spot on the console.

"Now that button there is the helmic regulator. Turn it thirty degrees, and then pull up."

She did as he instructed and the time rotor started pumping up and down.

"That's the ticket!" She met the Doctor's grin across the console. He pointed to a crank and a bicycle pump and she moved to stand next to them.

"Now turn this," he gestured towards the crank, "seventeen times anticlockwise, while pumping this every other turn."

She began to do as she was told, but on the seventeenth turn she slipped up and forgot to pump. The TARDIS shook, and she grabbed at the console to steady herself. She became aware of the Doctor's hand grasping her waist, and shivered, raising her eyes to meet his over her shoulder.

"Steady there."

Rose stared into his eyes, bright with excitement and something else. It hit her then, like a bullet to the heart. He was looking at her in that moment like he did when she was Rose Tyler.

"Now, where do you want to go?"

Her heart clenched and her head filled with a dizzy fog. Could he feel for her now what he clearly had felt for Rose? Could the two of them have a future together? But how could they do that without him knowing who she once was? And what would it do to him, to her, to them to let that information be known?

She cleared her throat. "Doctor…" She hesitated a moment, mind drowning in the implications of her epiphany. She tried in vain to find something, anything, that she might say, but her thoughts had turned into a tumultuous sea of confusion and self-doubt. Suddenly, her mind lighted upon a topic that might give her the distance she needed in that moment, and she breathed out, letting this diversion be her temporary life raft.

"Doctor, when we were at the market back on Earth, I had a chat with an Ood."

The Doctor's whole body went rigid. "Oh?"

He began to pace about the console, fiddling with various buttons and levers, refusing to meet her eyes.

"Yes. He said—or she said, I've never been sure how to tell Ood gender—" she sighed, walking over to the Doctor, who was staring determinedly at the monitor. She placed a hand on his arm. "It said that it's been summoning you. That you've been ignoring it. Why would you do that, Doctor? What if it's in trouble? What if—"

"Oh, don't you worry about that, Iris Fletcher. Nothing to be concerned about there." He began to race about the console in earnest then, and the ship shook back and forth as she transported them to a new location. "Now, I know just the planet you'd love. Weeeell…it's really more of an asteroid…thing. Anyways, forty-third century Firezia has the best leather goods in all of spacetime, and don't think I don't notice how you love that jacket you wear. Just one moment and we'll have you bartering with an old friend of mine."

The TARDIS shook hard and Rose fell down onto the grating with a thud.

"Here we are, then, Manova District, Firezia, 4447." The Doctor tugged on his coat and strode towards the door, not sparing her a second glance. She pushed herself to her feet.

"You'll want to be careful not to offend their gods. The Firezians are very religious in this period. Devotion to handicraft is considered the utmost sign of piety, so it makes it the best period for shopping, but you should be careful not to ever show your elbows. That's absolutely scandalous behavior in these parts. Had a companion a while back whose jumper caught fire—bit of trouble with this fire-breathing munchkin lady, long story—so she pulled it off to stamp out the flames and was arrested for public indecency! Took me three days serving as her barrister in full jury trial to get her off. Of course, it somewhat makes sense that Firezians are offended by elbows, considering they're the most sensitive part of their anatomy…"

Rose sighed, following him out the door, and hoping that this time she could leave this planet with all of her clothing intact.

When the Doctor stepped outside the TARDIS, his foot sunk ankle-deep into fine pink sand.

"You all right?" came Iris's voice from above him.

"Yes, fine, can you…?" He gestured towards the boardwalk just to his left, and she grasped his hand to pull him up onto it.

"There we are then," he said, shaking sand off the hem of his coat before standing up straight to examine their surroundings.

They were on a tiny island surrounded by a pale orange sea. The lone structure was a conical lighthouse, its tall blue form piercing the cloudy grey sky. The spherical light adorning the top had the effect of making the structure look like an enormous party hat. Well, he never did finish reattaching the gravimetric anomalizer properly, did he? No wonder he landed them in the wrong place. Who could blame him, though, with Iris telling that tale that cut so close to home? It explained that pained, far off gaze she got sometimes, when she thought he wasn't looking. Quite the pair they made, didn't they? They ran hand-in-hand towards adventure whilst haunted by memories of their lost—

"Za!" shouted a little blue man waving his arms and almost tripping over his neon green platform boots. "Za! Za!"

"Hello!" the Doctor greeted him, secretly glad that it appeared that he had landed on Firezia, if not in the region he had intended. With Iris's earlier comment about meeting Ood Sigma, he was quite grateful that his ship hadn't taken it upon herself to bring him straight to the Oodsphere, meddlesome as she could be.

"Have you been vaccinated?" the man said, breathless, putting a hand to his chest.

"Sorry? Vaccinated, did you say? What for?"

The man's eyes widened and he grabbed their hands, pulling them towards the lighthouse.

"We better get you inside! C'mon now! Hurry! Hurry!"

The man rushed them inside the lighthouse into a warm, cheery kitchen. There, a blue woman balanced a baby on her hip and stirred a large steaming kettle of grey sludge.

"Za," she nodded to them as they entered. "Who are you, then?"

"Oh, just travellers, passing through, " the Doctor answered, striding about the small room, looking for anything noteworthy, stopping to finger the fabric of a pair of flowery curtains.

"Made those myself," said the blue man smiling broadly and nodding towards the curtains. "I've become quite good with a needle and thread." He gestured towards the woman. "Molo insists that the only thing you'll catch her sewing is skin."

Molo's lips twitched in the slightest hint of a smile, before her brew began to boil and her eyes narrowed again in concentration. The Doctor took a seat at the kitchen table, eyes narrowing in concern when he noticed Iris standing uncomfortably in the corner, her gaze far away. Could she be preparing to press him on…?

"Molo was a body mender back in Demia, see," the man explained, eyes turning warm as he watched her work. "And I was the sailor she brought back to life."

Molo snorted. "You got a little cut and passed out at the sight of your own blood. It was hardly life-threatening, Tholo."

"Anyways," Tholo continued, "I got the gig minding the lighthouse out here and I convinced her to marry me and come along."

"The things I do for love," Molo deadpanned. She walked over to Iris. "Mind Rollo a moment, will you? I've got to serve up the vaccination."

Iris took hold of the infant, balancing it awkwardly in her arms and holding it slightly away from her body. The baby gurgled, reaching out a hand to bat at her nose. Iris swallowed, biting her lower lip.

"You know, I'm a bit overheated," Iris said, handing the child off to its father. "I think I'll just nip outside for some air." She rushed out of the room before anyone had time to comment.

The Doctor's hearts twinged in discomfort, pushing aside worries that she might force him to confront the fate he'd been running from once and for all.

Rose breathed the sea air, closing her eyes and letting its faint spicy scent overwhelm her senses. She sat down in the sand, knees tucked under her chin as she watched waves the colour of orange sherbet lap the shore.

She had known deep down that what she currently had with the Doctor was unsustainable, that eventually she would be unable to dodge more detailed queries into her past. She had told herself that should it come to that she would end it with him, rather than face the emotional fallout of revealing her identity and sharing the details of their time apart. Yet, she had never considered that what they had might transcend the changes that time and regeneration had wrought. Her breath quickened, and her head spun in panic.

Suddenly, a splashing noise diverted her attention to her right. There, a man with skin the same colour as the water emerged from the waves, pushing wet, green hair back from his forehead. Rose's gaze tracked downward to where water glistened on his fit form, naked all the way down to his webbed toes.

He grinned, then, a spectacular thing that lit up his face, and she found herself smiling back, even in her state of distress. He walked over to her, taking a seat on the sand by her side.

"You are troubled." It wasn't a question.

She nodded, returning her gaze to the waves and pacing her breaths in attempt to calm herself. She watched them break upon the shore in an almost hypnotic rhythm, allowing calm to settle in her limbs once more. It must have been fifteen minutes before the man spoke again, as if sensing the moment she was ready to speak.

"The water, it helps?" he asked. He stared at her, unblinking, almost as if he was seeing through her.

Rose cleared her throat, nodding before looking away. "I've always loved the seaside. Ever since I was a young girl. My mum was seeing this bloke for a while when I was eight or nine, yeah? Owned this tiny chippy on the Penwith Peninsula. Me and Mum would go down every weekend so she could see him, and I would just spend hours playing on the shore. Making sand castles, doing cartwheels on the beach, chasing after the boys…daring them to kiss me."

She flashed the handsome stranger a coy grin, before returning her gaze to the horizon.

"But some days…some days I'd sit, just like this, eating chips and watching the waves." She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. "Smelled different back home, though. More like salt and sun cream and less like…" She sniffed, frowning. "Indian food? Yeah, Indian food. That's so weird. Good weird, mind. Gives me a mighty craving for some curry."

She glanced at the stranger beside her to find him staring at her still, clear orange eyes trained on her face.

"And what do you see, when you watch the waves?" He blinked at her, face inscrutable.

She narrowed her eyes. "Well, I don't know…" She gave the man a casual shrug, returning her attention to the surf, eyes fixated on the long line of the horizon. She shook her head. "No, I do know. It's a smallness. A sense that me and my petty problems…that maybe they don't matter when the universe is so vast." A heavy feeling gathered in her chest, and she looked away, tucking a flyaway hair behind her ear.

"And you like this, this small feeling?"

She closed her eyes, nodding. "It's the same feeling I get traveling with the Doctor these days. Seeing so much of space and time. Making a difference in the things that matter. Maybe that makes up for the damage I've done along the way, seeing as I'm so small and the multiverse so large."

The man tilted his head, staring at her for a full ten seconds. Rose looked away, squirming under his silent scrutiny.

"It sounds to me as if you are the opposite of small, Rose Tyler, no matter how the waves make you feel," he said at long last.

She stiffened. "I never told you that name. Never told you any name."

He blinked. "But this is your name, yes? The word most you most closely identify with your sense of self?" He frowned. "My Sense is still emerging, but that bit felt quite clear to me."

Rose's mouth opened and closed. She bit her bottom lip, before glancing away.

"Might be. Not sure I know anymore. Or if I even want it to be." She sighed. "Life would sure be easier if I wasn't."

"So, what exactly do we need vaccinating for?" the Doctor asked his hosts, sniffing the warm sludge from the bowl Molo handed to him.

"To prevent you from broadcasting," Tholo replied, bouncing his son on his knee. He took the bright orange flower from his lapel and gave it to the little boy to play with. The Doctor noticed Molo's eyes turn bright and warm watching the pair of them from her place by the stove.

"Broadcasting?"

"Your emotions," Tholo answered, enunciating his words and looking at the Doctor as if he was very slow.

"Am I doing that?" the Doctor asked, startled.

"Well, it's not as if we know when we're doing it, do we?" Molo replied, pulling a syringe and a tourniquet from a drawer and moving to sit beside him. "But the Maw can pick up on it, and that's what matters."

"The Maw?"

Molo and Tholo stared at him. "Za," said Tholo, "you get amnesia out at sea?"

"Sorry, I'm a bit…forgetful. So what is this Maw exactly?"

The couple look at each other, before turning back to stare at him.

"It's a monster," their voices echoed in unison.

"How could you stop being Rose Tyler?" the man asked her, puzzled.

Rose turned to him then. There was something in this man's face, an honesty and benevolence in his eyes that made her innately trust him.

"I sort of…changed form recently," she replied, feeling relief in voicing the words she dared not speak to the Doctor. "I feel like a different person, in this body."

The man's eyebrows drew together. "A change of form is not a change of person. To phase is a natural part of one's existence. But the many are still one."

"To phase?"

"It is the nature of my species. We phase—or change physical form, as you would say—whenever we experience a transition in life. It can be a gradual change, like growing up, or sudden, like the death of a family member. But it doesn't change our essence. Every Lanthana knows this."

Rose shook her head. "I'm not sure it works for me like it works for you."

The man paused, before nodding quickly to himself. "Let me bring you to the Mother. Her Sense has helped many a young Lanthana experiencing his first phasing."

He stood up, offering Rose his hand. Perhaps it was the strong sense of trustworthiness she got from this man. Perhaps it was just a need to get away from this desperate, panicky feeling for a while. Whichever the case, Rose found herself taking the stranger's hand and following him into the waves.