Chapter Text
When he comes to again, he's still sweating, and she's still stroking his hair. He wonders this time if he really is dead.
Only she feels… different.
Smaller.
He opens his eyes to realise he's got his head in the lap of someone very familiar, and he can tell by the way she's playing with his hair. Someone he shares DNA with...after a very hard fall against a bookshelf.
"Mia?"
She beams at him, igniting his heart just as it always does.
"Daddy, are you okay? You fell. You scared me."
Looking around, he sees that a crowd has gathered.
One face in the crowd feels like sunshine incarnate, and it's simultaneously like he hasn't seen her in ages, and like he's embarrassed she's going to chide him again for not being careful, and he cannot place why.
"Doctor, love, are you okay?" Rose asks, kneeling on the floor next to him.
His mind is rushing in two different directions, and he's trying to push down the nausea, but he nods, trying to get up, much to the protestation of the store owner.
Rose reassures him that the Doctor is fine, and she helps pull him up, not releasing him from her grip.
Mia puts her tiny hand in his, guiding him over to a corner inside the bookshop that has several squashy sofas and a low table.
He sits, leaning forward, hands in his face as the memories come back from when he was out.
Rose sits next to him, and Mia on the other side, both rubbing his back.
"Did you have another episode…where you saw…him?"
He nods.
And then he looks at her in an expression that only she could understand, and he cups her cheek, reverently. A look that translates that he's fully there and desperate for her to see him. As though he'd just spent several beautiful years with her, and several excruciating ones without her.
Her expression falters, and tears start dripping down her cheeks, as she brings her hand to her mouth.
She pulls him in, sobbing.
"Welcome home, Doctor," she whispers.
He melts into her, aware that they are making a bit of a scene, but he just doesn't care.
He opens his eyes to look on one of the shelves next to the chairs, and there is a charming little snowglobe there---a scene of a flock of birds, rising into the sky...and the snow is swirling around as though someone had just shaken it.
On the front, one word is inscribed: "Vale."
And he speaks.
"He's free. He regenerated. But all of me is here, now."
Mia presses herself into his side more firmly.
Rose nods, pressing her lips together, trying not to cry harder, but she swallows her tears.
"Doctor, I don't mean to interrupt, we can talk about all this later. But the moment it happened, you had just picked this up. It's a novel, about an android-human hybrid woman who travels in time solving crimes with Agatha Christie."
He holds it in his hand.
The name on the bottom reads "The number one bestseller, by Dr. Donna Noble-McAvoy."