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When Rose was sixteen, she realized love was the only thing that ever mattered.
So she dropped out of secondary school for a boy called Jimmy Stone, and he dropped out of her life a few weeks later, taking her computer with him.
When Rose was seventeen, she realized love didn't actually exist - at least not the kind you hear about in movies, the kind she thought she had with Jimmy. So she and Mickey got back together, and that was nice. It was comforting.
When Rose was nineteen, she realized she would never know anything - not about love, not about herself, not about the universe. But she wanted to try, so she ran away with a time traveling alien in a box.
When Rose was twenty, she realized she had it about right the first time.
1. Dancing Badly
The problem with being in love with a shapeshifter was how easy it was. Well, she couldn’t be sure if that was true of all shapeshifters.
Maybe it was just the problem with being in love with the Doctor.
One moment, she had been looking in blue eyes, and they were so blue, they were so endlessly blue. And she had thought, she had actually thought the words, I’ll never love any other eyes. Not in the same way.
And then they were brown.
Just that was enough to have her feet moving away, her hands gripping the TARDIS, anything familiar, to keep steady.
Because he said run, and he said Rose, and his eyes (not blue, brown) somehow looked the same - and all of it was too much, because she could deal with Charles Dickens and bigger on the inside and Slitheen, but her Doctor just - being gone, she couldn’t.
Right?
Right? She asked herself again later, unable to leave any part of him, especially when a christmas tree was currently tearing its way through the flat.
Right? She asked herself as she whispered “Help me,” into his ear, because if there was one thing her Doctor would have woken up for, it was that (And shouldn’t she pick him up, fight her way out, carve a hole out of their back wall if she had to, anything but sitting and whispering into some stranger’s ear, because her Doctor was gone, and the only one who could help him - help her - was her, right?)
But he woke up. And that was it.
Still him, every part of her sang.
Shut up, she told the singing.
You didn’t just give up on people. You didn’t just forget the love of your life. Not their shape, their voice, their eyes. Not completely.
So when they finally made it to that Ian Dury concert, and Rose discovered she had, just a little, it was scarier than him being gone.
How could she forget the man who took her hand and showed her everything? Who danced with her during the Blitz? Who thought there was a choice between the world and her?
Because he’s right there, she thought. He still got oil on his cheeks if he spent too much time under the TARDIS console, and he still smelled like diesel and lime, and he still held her hand every chance he got, and loved romantic comedies (except now he admitted to it).
Her old Doctor would have been standing in the back of the concert, tapping his foot, but her new Doctor danced and she understood why he didn’t before, he was pretty bad.
But, no - her old Doctor had been good. And she had liked that.
But now he was bad. And she liked that even more.
Now he could endlessly talk, and ate a significantly larger amount of jam, and had great hair.
Rose watched the Doctor dance badly to Ian Dury - he really had no sense of rhythm - and realized she had fallen in love with that stupid alien twice.
2. Clumsiness
She felt twenty again, looking at this new Doctor, a stranger, who was somehow even younger.
She didn’t know when she had done it, but apparently she had convinced herself it would never happen again, that it would be brown eyes and messy hair and trainers for the rest of her life. She had at least been prepared to make it never happen again.
And on the Doctor’s side, he had been prepared to never be without her again, whether that involved burning through all his regenerations or not.
For a moment, in the crashing TARDIS, there was silence. They stared at each other, desperate in different ways.
Then the moment ended with a rattle of the floor, and the Doctor began dashing around the console as they were tossed this way and that, and he had almost gotten thrown out, but Rose pulled him back. Everything was on fire, and when Rose looked up a book dropped on her head, because oh, she had fallen into the library somehow.
Basically - chaos. Familiar, mad chaos - except the person she desperately reached for as they banged about, pulling levers and yelling, was not her Doctor.
Yet it was him she found herself on top of, panting near the pool littered with books when everything was finally over.
“You okay?” he asked her.
“Yeah. You?”
“I’m lucky, still have some regeneration energy. No bruises.”
They laid there, staring at each other for another moment. Rose waited until he moved away, brushed it aside, pretended everything was the same.
He didn’t.
He said, “I’m still me.”
“I know,” she said. But she didn’t, not really.
“I still love you.”
Rose went stiff. If there had been one thing he could have said to convince her he wasn’t her Doctor, it was that.
“Rose?” His eyes were pleading with her to say something. His green eyes.
What did he want her to say? ‘I still love you too?’
She didn’t even know him.
But she wanted to try.
“Let’s go, Doctor.” It felt weird in her mouth.
She got up, offered her hand. He held it, so incredibly tight.
Together they found that the console was sideways and the TARDIS doors were on the ceiling.
And together they grappled out into Amelia Pond’s backyard.
This Doctor was somehow more of a showboat than her last two combined - and yet strangely more honest. In one breath, he could talk about how bananas were scientifically proven to be the best possible emergency ration, and in fact he had been the one to prove it, that Rose's voice was his favorite noise in the universe, and that he had been (briefly) Shakespeare's ghost writer in 1593. It was hard not to compare him to her last Doctor, who would rather have regenerated than said anything close to what this new Doctor dropped in casual conversation (But she couldn't say she completely disagreed with the change).
She found their movie and wine nights involved a lot less wine, since the Doctor's taste buds had become ridiculously sensitive. He tried to put up a good fight for her, but she just rolled her eyes and finished his glass for him in one go.
In fact, it seemed everything about this Doctor was ridiculous, and even though he did his best to be impressive, he only ever really succeeded at being incredibly, endearingly daft.
She was in love with him by the time he tripped.
He and Amy were talking above her about something. Rose was underneath the new TARDIS console, looking at some suspicious wires.
“Doctor?” she asked. “Are these supposed to be sparking?”
She heard the glass above her clang as he jumped up. He started to run down the stairs, but changed his mind and leapt over the railing (and hadn’t her last Doctor been particularly keen on jumping over things unnecessarily?). When he landed, his foot caught on nothing and he fell on his face. Quite spectacularly.
Rose tried not to laugh. “Are you okay?”
He hopped up in one movement. “Absolutely. Just peachy. All according to plan. Now, about the -" He stopped.
Rose had given up and was laughing, hard. Way harder than she had in a while.
He adjusted his bowtie. “If you think that was a fall, you should’ve seen me at the 2074 Anti-Grav Olympics.”
She leant on him, doubled over in a fit. She couldn’t make herself stop.
“Rose,” he smiled, lending an arm to stabilize her. “I’m not that bad, am I?” He tried to sound put out, but it was rather hard with her leaning on him and filling the TARDIS with her laughter.
“Doctor? Rose?” Amy looked down at them. “Just thought you should know the TARDIS is on fire.”
“Ah,” the Doctor said. “Right.”
3. Tea
It was almost a thousand years before her next Doctor.
She thought she was prepared for it, she had made herself prepare for it - but after a thousand years no one could ever have been prepared for it.
“I can’t deal with this right now,” was the first thing he said to her. He was Scottish. He was old.
“The TARDIS crashing?” Rose asked, still staring at him. The TARDIS was indeed crashing. Again.
“No. You. You, staring at me.” His hands, which had basically been the last him’s other mouth, always moving, hovered blankly at the console. He pressed a few buttons, which Rose had been sure were meant for making tea in a completely different room. She couldn’t remember.
“Deal with it, then,” she said. She kept staring. Besides that she couldn't tell what she was doing. Cataloguing the differences? The similarities? There were so many more differences. But his eyes were still green. Sort of.
“Do you remember how to fly this thing?” he asked her. And those eyebrows.
“No.”
“Hold on then. And stop that.”
The TARDIS hit something, nearly knocking her off her feet. She kept staring.
“No.”
“Seriously. We’re both going to die if you don’t stop doing that.” He pulled a lever. The lever was good, Rose remembered the lever did something good.
“You already died.” She rotated a dial that might have been related to a brake.
He pushed her to the side, hurriedly rotating the dial back again. “Congratulations, you’ve just lowered our shields so we can die faster.”
“It isn’t for shields,” she said, twisting it back, “It slows us down.”
He put a hand on hers to stop her and she had to stifle a gasp because that was not the hand she had held for the last thousand years of her life and it never would be again. “It lowers the shiel-” He stopped.
Rose felt her legs coming out from under her.
“Ah,” the Doctor said, twisting the dial back again. They both landed on the grating with a thunk. “Anti-gravs.”
“I thought I told you to move those to the other side!”
“This is the other side!”
His face was so intense. His face was usually intense, but this was different. Maybe it was the eyebrows.
“Stop. Doing. That.” he said.
“No.”
They glared at each other as the TARDIS shot off sparks and rocketed through time like a bucking horse.
He turned away, pressing more buttons, pulling more levers, definitely at random. “I can’t take regenerating around you. Always with the staring!" His voice became high pitched, whiny: "'Ooh, Doctor, is it really you? I can't be sure, I only just saw you change right in front of me.' Well it is! It’s me, Rose! Take a good long, look! This is who I am!”
Rose was silent. She remembered her last Doctor, his vulnerable "I still love you."
Could he regenerate and not love her?
Past him had said no - but he didn't really know, did he?
The next bump of the ship knocked her to the grating. Then everything went still.
She heard the Doctor open the doors.
"Rose?"
"Hm?"
"We are somewhere very dark."
"That's nice."
"The walls seem to be breathing."
She sighed. "Close the doors."
He did.
And then the TARDIS rocked them hard, one last time, as they were spat out of a dinosaur's stomach into Victorian London.
Late at night in a Victorian flat, they laid in bed together, both completely awake.
"I'm sorry," the Doctor said.
The only noise was the dinosaur, crying and alone a few streets away.
"Please don't leave," he said.
"I was never going to," Rose said.
"Good."
"Do you still love me?" Rose asked.
"Yes."
"Good."
They both faced the window, Rose in front, watching smoke pouring out of chimneys.
"I do hate regenerating with you," the Doctor said. "It never used to be this nerve wracking. Just a bit of horrific pain and a little existential crisis to deal with."
"I'm sorry. But I love you too much to let any of you go."
They were silent for a long while.
Then Rose spoke.
"I miss him." She was horrified to find tears in her eyes.
She rolled over to face him.
And the hug didn't come as naturally as it used to, but it came, fierce and tight around her as she cried into his chest.
"I don't really hate regenerating with you," he said.
"I know," she said.
This Doctor was different. He was angrier. He played electric guitar and wore sunglasses. He was okay with people dying. He was okay with people dying especially if it meant she was safe.
Sometimes he was even the cause.
Rose wasn't a fan of that.
They fought. Usually she won.
Mostly (entirely, completely, always) she loved him.
But she didn't realize that until she saw him drink tea.
He didn't do anything in half measures - everything was a topic, anything could be a we have to go there, now. He had a strong opinion on planets she had never heard him mention before, foods she'd never seen him eat. When he was bad at something, he was bad. When he was good, he was the best there ever was (although, that wasn't too far off from before, not that she'd ever tell him).
It was all so very exciting. Especially when he was gentle, like a wave rolling at her ankles, when she knew the ocean could pull her down, easy.
But ultimately it was the way he took his tea that did her in - not with five sugars, like her last Doctor, not three, like her Doctor before (and how innocent had she been to think that was a lot) but ten.
The Doctor took his tea with ten sugars.
God, she loved him.
4. Let's be Honest - Everything
There was only a brief moment Rose had to stare at the Doctor in absolute shock, and that the Doctor had to pull over the console screen to see her new face, before everything exploded and they both plummeted to the Earth.
Generally, they tried to put it aside. It was too big to handle, and their favorite distraction - saving the day - had conveniently arisen.
Once that was over, they shopped for clothes.
Rose had many friends throughout her time with the Doctor. Not just Bill, Donna, Martha, Clara - but aliens and people she'd meet for a day or so, usually women. She'd never been strapped for feminine comfort. And she shopped with the Doctor all the time.
So why was this one of the most alien feelings she'd had in a long while?
Because her husband was now her wife.
Her wife was currently throwing shirts, dresses, suits, and trousers at her, a heavy pile growing in her arms, filling up her vision.
"Rose," she practically squealed. "They have Stetsons here. Remember my old one? We have to get this."
And when they went into the dressing room, Rose found almost everything in the pile looked suspiciously familiar - bow ties, a long, brown trench coat, a leather jacket.
Rose realized she had not really been fulfilling her job in helping the Doctor pick a new style, and that she might be vital, in fact, this time, so she said "I'll be right back," and suddenly the Doctor grabbed her hand, clutched it so tightly. All her plastered joy had fallen away to reveal such a sharp desperation.
"I'll see you in a moment, then," she said.
Rose gripped her hand back. "Not if I see you first."
The Doctor gave what Rose decided was her first, tentative, real smile. It was wonderful.
They tried so many different things. The Doctor insisted on a coat. Rose ended up vying for suspenders. And they had seen the striped shirt at the same time, both reaching for it with an "Ooh!"
Their eyes and hands met, and Rose couldn't help it, she laughed. It was all so strange, and yet familiar.
When the Doctor decided her outfit was done, she stood proud, staring at herself in awe. "I love it," she said.
Her eyes met Rose's in the mirror. "Is this okay?"
"Yes," Rose said. Something tightened in her chest when she caught sight of her last Doctor's clothes, discarded on the floor.
But it loosened again, watching the Doctor twist, the coat twirling behind her. She was so happy.
"More than okay," Rose breathed.
"Stupid, bloody humans!" Her last Doctor had said, finding her waiting in the rain. Some friends had stood her up for lunch, so she had eaten alone. "There's absolutely no sense of time in their tiny little minds. They wake up in the morning and go, 'I wonder where the sun's in rotation now?' And two hours later, they still don't remember! It's all, 'Hold on, let me check my digital watch. To see the time of day.' A digital watch, Rose."
She snorted. "No one uses digital watches in this time period, Doctor. I'm also pretty sure they didn't lose track of time, they just didn't care."
He looked absolutely, comically appalled by this idea that she had to laugh.
"Stop laughing!" he said, although that had definitely been the intended effect. "This is serious! Something is wrong with your friends. Have you called the nearest mental institution?"
She kept laughing. They went to see Clara that night.
Her new Doctor was so vastly different.
Rose had explored an alien market on her own, and the guy she was shopping with - she actually thought they were becoming friends! - pinched her bag.
"Might've given it to him, if he asked," she told the Doctor later. "But he stole it, pretended to like me n' everything."
The Doctor scrunched up her nose in disgust. "Forget him."
And she pulled Rose back out into the marketplace, scanned her eyes through the crowd. "There," she pointed at a woman sitting alone on a bench. "That one."
Before Rose could ask what that possibly meant, she was being pulled along again.
"I'm the Doctor," the Doctor introduced herself to the woman, "and this is Rose. We're going to be your friends now, if that's alright." She plunked down on the bench.
The woman blinked. "Uh. Sure."
Rose held out a hand, her eyes twinkling with mirth. The woman gave her a confused smile back, and shook it.
The woman's name was Charlotte. She was an off-world accountant and downright lovely. She took them to play poker since her boyfriend needed more people that night (the Doctor beat everyone, even though Rose almost gave away her playing-dumb act by bursting into laughter multiple times).
"See?" the Doctor asked Rose later. "Every one bag thief, there's twenty Charlottes."
Rose blinked. She had forgotten about the whole being robbed thing.
If Rose was being honest, there were too many things that had her falling for the Doctor, or at least realizing how deep she had already fallen.
Her smile, her laugh, her nose scrunch - those hit her like a train.
And then there were times Rose felt like she was being wrapped in a blanket, or maybe smothered by a hugely cosmic power. The Doctor would suddenly stop, in the middle of the street, in the middle of a crowd, anywhere. She would get this look in her eyes, because a display window, an ad maybe, was showing a plushie, theme park rides, even fast food. All of it, anything, the Doctor loved. She loved so fiercely and so excitedly the dumbest, smallest things. And Rose found she did, too.
On the TARDIS she concentrated, still and quiet and focused. It was different for all her Doctors, how they looked when they focused like that. But this Doctor seemed almost at peace.
Sometimes Rose thought she was waiting for permission from the Doctor's other parts. A wink from eyebrow Doctor that reminded her of bowtie Doctor, a grumpy frown from her current Doctor that reminded her of her first.
Other times it was their differences that did it, and wasn't that dizzying logic - when she had one, she would never, ever, give them up, not for anything, and then they would be gone and suddenly she was in love with an entirely new stranger.
Wasn't it just unfair?
Wasn't it just stupidly unfair, how easy it was, to fall in love with her, with them, with the Doctor, again and again and again.
Sometimes, she still remembered what she had thought about her first Doctor.
I’ll never love any other eyes. Not in the same way.
She decided that was about right. For all of them.
5. And one time the Doctor fell in love with her
"I'm left travelling on my own 'cause there's no one else," the Doctor told Rose in a busy street of London during 2005.
"There's me," Rose said.
And then she suggested chips, and that had pretty much been it for him.