Secrets, the Doctor thinks later, are all good and well until they're not yours. Then they should promptly be revealed, dissected, and mutated into a firmly non-secret status, before being submerged into a vat of Blorgax acid. The future should hold a decidedly anti-secret policy for everyone who is not him.

He arrives at this decision after a trip in the freshly grown TARDIS goes a bit pear-shaped. It turns out that the Indeasian raptors in this universe are not friendly toward humans, and, as ever, the Doctor seems determined to find that out the hard way.

"Move!" Rose shouts, but his stupid human body can't respond in time. He freezes in place, only able to watch as a stream of liquid fire hurtles toward him. Doesn't even have a chance to throw up his arm in front of his face.

Luckily, Rose is a little faster than he is.

Instead of blinding pain, there's just the sensation of Rose's body barreling into him, knocking him into the ground so hard that the air rips from his lungs. The liquid fire shoots out in spurts overhead and eats into the wall behind him. He smells it singe the air and Rose's jacket, oxygen molecules and cotton-poly blends burning with an acrid stench. His shoulder strikes duracrete and he'll have a nasty bruise to contend with later, but he's safe from getting his skin boiled off.

"We've gotta get out of here," Rose pants, pushing off the temple floor and yanking him up before he has a chance to say anything. "Come on!"

She pulls him along and the two of them are laughing as they run and it isn't until they've made it back down the mountain, safely back in the TARDIS, that the Doctor notices something is wrong.

The TARDIS doors slam behind them and both Rose and the Doctor slump back, breathless and exhilarated, laughing even harder now at the sounds of their pursuers scrabbling to get in. Indeasian raptor-claws may be made of some of the toughest stuff in the universe, but when it comes to the TARDIS, they can't so much as a scratch the paint. Rose and the Doctor can hear the raptors calling for reinforcements and that just doubles their mirth, the silliness of it all, the triumph of a mission gone right and the adrenaline of such a close call.

But when the Doctor wraps his arms around Rose to bring her in for a hug (and maybe a little snog too), she stiffens in his arms, a pained whimper dying in her throat.

"It's nothing," she grunts. She doesn't look at him when she says it. "Just a little banged-up from back at the temple."

"You all right?"

"I'll be fine, just a bit sore."

"You wouldn't happen to need any clever fingers to take care of that for you?" the Doctor asks with a grin.

Rose smiles back at him, and later, he'll curse himself for not thinking anything of it, the fact that the smile is just a little thinner than usual. "Raincheck on that, but—tea in a few minutes, maybe?" Rose asks. "I'm just going to run down to the medbay first, see what I can do to take care of this."

"Certainly," the Doctor nods, and he can't help it; he presses a kiss to her forehead. It's easily one of his more human habits and judging by how Rose's face brightens—well, she's noticed.

"What was that for?" she asks.

"For saving me, back at the temple. Now go," he says, swatting her behind for emphasis. (He almost doesn't notice the wince that crosses her face after.) "Medbay now, tea later!"

"Yes, sir," Rose answers with a faux salute before she turns and leaves. The Doctor bounds off to the galley with a grin on his lips and a song in his head and he whistles to himself, both while he makes tea and after, and he waits.

And waits. And waits. And waits a little bit more.

He sits for about twenty-six minutes (twenty-five minutes and thirty-seven seconds, to be precise) before he starts to think maybe something's up.

(Probably she's just fallen asleep in the medbay, he thinks. Rose has a remarkable ability to fall asleep anywhere, anywhen. It's like a superpower. She sits down, and poof! Instant deep sleep. The Doctor is half-tempted to diagnose her with selective narcolepsy.)

"Rose?" he calls before he sets foot in the medbay, but she doesn't respond. He grins to himself. Sleep, it is. Maybe they should start keeping pillows in all of the rooms.

The Doctor pushes the bay door open. "Rose, the tea's—"

Rose looks up at him and freezes. She is not asleep. She is sitting on the counter, half-naked, an eighty-seventh century dermal reconstructor clutched in one hand. A trail of mismatched items stretches from him to her—the rubbish of empty medical packs, a pile of dirty flannels, a jacket and two shirts shed on the floor where she dropped them.

He doesn't know how he missed it before, but while her jacket is merely singed, her shirts are completely scorched on one side. The shirts are almost more hole than shirt.

"—gone cold," the Doctor finishes, more for completion's sake than anything else.

His eyes travel from the mess on the floor, up to Rose's body, and his feet follow. He looks her over. The wound is mostly gone—good stuff, eighty-seventh century medicine—but if the rubbish on the floor is anything to go by, she's ripped through at least four packs of genetic repair material, yet her skin is still raw and red, even blistered in some places.

If that's what the wound looks like now…he doesn't want to know how it looked before.

"I'm fine," Rose blurts out.

An odd feeling suffuses the Doctor's being, then. Sort of like all the blood rushing from the top of his head to pump in his ears. Strangely, the sound of his thundering pulse is all he can hear.

The Doctor doesn't say anything. Slipping his specs on, he rifles through a cabinet until he finds a clean flannel, uses it to wipe some of the excess repair material from Rose's ribs. His motions are brisk, efficient; he overlooks how Rose cringes with every stroke. Once she's cleaned off, the Doctor pulls a drawer open and extricates a small silver vial. Rose was on the right track when she used the reconstructor, and distantly, he's proud of her for remembering that, for squirreling away the offhand detail he dropped however many weeks ago when they first stocked up on medical supplies. But she couldn't have known that the reconstructor works best when paired with a tincture from Vorgor, because he never told her, because he never thought she'd try to use it on her own, because he never thought she'd be reckless enough to let herself get hurt for him.

He doesn't want to think about why she'd be reckless enough to get hurt for him.

The Doctor feels incalculably stupid that he didn't figure all this out sooner.

"You lied to me," he says quietly.

Rose arches an eyebrow at him. "What? When?"

Shaking his head, the Doctor ignores her questions. "If I'm too thick to get out of the way next time, you should just let me get hit. There's no point in you getting hurt."

Rose laughs uncertainly. "Okay, erm, don't take this the wrong way—I love you and all, but that, back there? It wasn't anything special. That was just Torchwood training taking over. I would have done it for anyone."

"Would you?" the Doctor asks, his voice pulled tight like a rubber band.

Rose lets out an audible sigh when he dabs tincture on her wound. It will still take a few minutes to fully heal, but the pain relief is instant. "Yes," Rose replies after a moment, and he can hear her trying to regulate her breathing, urging her body to ditch the last of its flight-or-flight response and return to normal. "Besides," she continues, "Not like I could let you get hurt, right? The universe needs you more than it needs me."

"Nonsense," the Doctor mutters. He rubs at his eyes under his specs. Gods, he's tired all of a sudden. "I am utterly taken aback at the amount of complete, unmitigated nonsense streaming from your mouth right now."

"Well, that's too bad, cos it's true."

"Don't be stupid."

"You're the one who's being stupid. Can't you have even a little sympathy for the hurt girl?"

The rubber band stretches further and the Doctor can feel his patience straining along with it. "No," he breathes, dabbing on the last of the ointment, "I will not have sympathy, nor will I have patience, for someone who cannot respect my wishes regarding my own person. I did not want you to get hurt on my behalf. I did not ask for it. I never will ask for it. And I do not appreciate your cavalier attitude on the matter."

"Considering how you usually respond to things, that's sort of the pot calling the kettle black," Rose sighs. She runs a hand through her hair. "God, this is why I didn't say anything," she mutters, rolling her eyes.

Rubber pulls and snaps and the Doctor snaps too, hurling the vial to the ground so hard that it shatters with a crash.

"Oi—!" Rose starts to say, but her words are cut off when the Doctor grabs her by the chin.

"You won't do it again. Do you understand?" he demands, loudly, far more loudly than he needs to at this proximity, and fuck, but he hates how out-of-control this horrible human body is, how the rise of testosterone and depletion of monoamine can just send him careening off the rails. Hates the way Rose's eyes widen and she almost looks scared of him.

"Never again," he hisses. "I've had a millennia of experience taking care of myself. I don't need you to do it for me. I especially don't need anyone else to sacrifice themselves for me. It was a stupid thing to do. Astonishingly stupid, Rose. Do you hear me?"

"Jesus," Rose snaps. She jerks her head back and smacks his hand away. "Does everything have to be about your ridiculous fucking guilt?"

Anger boils his insides. "It isn't—"

"I'm not gonna act like you've never done anything wrong," Rose interrupts him. "Believe me, I know you're not perfect. Lord, do I know it. But it's just so unbelievably selfish and self-centered to act like you're the sole cause of everything that goes bad in the universe. It's not noble. It's certainly not healthy. It's this stupid self-martyrdom that doesn't help anybody."

"I'm not—"

"I mean, just for once, can we acknowledge that your feelings aren't the only ones that matter?" Rose chokes out. "Can you please just respect that I'm an adult, fully capable of making my own decisions, even if you don't like them?"

"It's nothing to do with that—" he tries to rush out, but she's already talking over him, and wow, does it fester under his skin to be on this side of things. He really does not take his own medicine very well, he realizes, and that just makes him even angrier.

"...and you're part of my team now. You are my team. That means I can't let anything happen to you!"

"And what about you, what about if something happens to you?" the Doctor half-shouts. "What am I supposed to do, then? You, you've got a family here, a mother and a brother and friends and a job and people who will miss you when you're gone. I've got nothing here, nothing and no one but you. You're going to take that away from me, too?" he finishes, and now he really is shouting.

And that's when Rose's lower lip trembles and her eyes are suddenly very shiny and oh god, she's about to cry, isn't she?

She is. She does.

Fat tears well up at the corners of her eyes and she pushes them away angrily and more take their place.

And that's when the panic sets in.

"Don't..." the Doctor starts. Starts and stops. Swallows the feeling of his stomach in his throat. Waits for the pounding in his ears to subside. Slipping his glasses off, he deposits them in his pocket with a heavy sigh, glances about the medbay uneasily.

He really did not need this reminder of just how different things are in this new world. All this talking and fighting and feeling and he's certain he wouldn't have to put up with any of it if he still had a fully-grown TARDIS and the full knowledge of the universe bouncing around his skull, because why would you fight about things when there are so many better things to do, planets to discover, people to save, new galaxies to name?

(A small voice in the back of his head also points out that none of those things are fun to do alone, that for everything he's lost, he's gained quite a lot too; he kindly tells that small voice exactly what it can do with itself, in language that would make his Time Lord counterpart blush.)

The Doctor wants to sound sympathetic, wishes he could comfort her the way she needs, but his voice just comes out sort of flat. "Don't do that," he mutters. "Please."

"Look," Rose mumbles, her voice thick and unsteady, "can we stop acting like you wouldn't do the exact same thing for me? And can we just pretend, just for a second, that I got hurt really badly today, and I could really use your support right now, and maybe, just maybe, my very real, very physical pain is just a tad more important than your self-imposed guilt?"

The Doctor considers it. He worries his tongue inside his mouth. He bites back a bitter laugh.

He turns and leaves the room.

The Doctor half-expects to find their bedroom empty when he retires later that night (after several hours of angry tinkering in which absolutely nothing productive happened, unless one lives in a world where four burned fingers are considered "productive"), but he pushes the door open to find that he's not alone. He can't see Rose, the room being as pitch-dark as it is (not everyone is lucky enough to sleep anywhere at will; he can't even doze off if there's so much as a shred of light in the room), but the soft sounds of her breathing give her away.

He can tell by the spaces between her breaths that she is not asleep. She is awake, and she is ignoring him. But she doesn't tell him to go away. That at least seems like something.

Shucking his plimsolls and nothing else, the Doctor quietly slides under the duvet, careful to disturb Rose as little as possible. She's lying with her back to him, so he can't see the look on her face to gauge how she feels right now, whether she wants a hug or not. But probably he should stay on his side of the bed tonight. Give her some space, let her come to him on her own terms.

Minutes tick by. He fidgets under the blanket. Toes curl in his socks and fingers clench at his sides. He's an island in his own bed and he doesn't like it. But he can be a responsible adult, can't he?

...no, apparently he can't.

Swallowing loudly, he rolls over, sidles closer to Rose until he can feel the heat of her body, even without touching her. He leaves that last inch and a half of space just in case.

Damn. All of this was so much easier when he could just refuse to talk about anything and simply bluster away.

"You think too highly of me," he tells her.

Rose laughs, a harsh sound. "Not right now, I don't."

"You do, though. Have for a long time."

"Yeah, and you've always loved it in the past, haven't you. You and your ridiculous ego."

"You love my ego."

"I hate you."

He chuckles. "That's very sweet. I hate you too."

Silence. The Doctor starts to wonder if she's drifted off to sleep after all. But then Rose reaches back for his hand and tugs his arm snugly around her. Holding back a relieved exhale, he allows himself to press closer until his body pillows hers and his face is buried in her hair. His hand splays over her stomach; fingers edge under her shirt like they've a mind of their own, but he isn't teasing her, isn't trying to start anything. He explores the expanse of her fresh new skin. It's hot to the touch and just a little too soft, a smidge too smooth, and even though she's healing quite nicely, he can still make out where new flesh meets old.

Anger still burns deep in his gut, an ember that smolders at the floor of his stomach. It's the urge to do something dramatic, the drive to hurt the people who hurt her. He should be better than that, but he's not. Not anymore.

"I'm not worth it, Rose," the Doctor says quietly. "You need something better to believe in."

A moment passes.

"You're an idiot," Rose says.

The Doctor doesn't care much for churches, he thinks. Oh, there are exceptions—he enjoys good architecture wherever he sees it, whether it's the high arches and dark interiors of Gothic cathedrals or the stunning crystal structures of New Earth's neo-neo-Pagan temples, and he'll never fail to appreciate the cultural significance of the Ice Warrior Monastery or the Harmandir Sahib. But no god is flawless, no religion infallible, and if none of it can be truly perfect, he'd much rather turn his attentions elsewhere. The TARDIS is as good a church as any, after all—can't beat those coral columns or that gentle meditative hum—and he's hard-pressed to find any religion that inspires the same kind of awe that he feels when he steps out onto a new world for the first time, when he looks up and sees a sky full of unfamiliar stars.

Certainly no religion can inspire what he feels when Rose curls her fingers around his, or takes charge of a Torchwood mission, or runs alongside him in fourteenth-century Japan, or presses a kiss to his lips, or rattles off a list of oddly specific technical jargon related to Dimension Cannons and very little else. It's a weird sort of affection. Omnipresent, distracting, and honestly, if he thinks about it too much, probably a little unhealthy. But humans are just so much more fascinating than lofty gods, real or fake or demi- or would-be or anything in-between.

"Give a girl a big head, talking about her like that," Rose teases when he mentions all of this to her one day. "You know that's an impossible standard to live up to, right?"

He doesn't.