It was always hard for the Doctor to describe the experience of entering someone else's mind. Partly because there wasn't any words for it, the way the mind flowed around him, yet remained entirely separate as he explored it, grasping on to vague ideas and images as they flashed by, his own self disembodied. If he had to describe it, he'd compare it to two rivers meeting and mingling; though that wasn't entirely true either, because they remained entirely separate at the same time until he chose to merge. There were books of Gallifreyan poetry on the subject, libraries of it, but no recount of the experience could truly capture it.

Quite frankly, it terrified him.

He entered Roses' mind with some trepidation, going carefully because he was such a large and ancient stream and she was so little and small, like the mighty Amazon crashing into a bubbling creek, and he stemmed his thoughts to a trickle to match hers, his subconscious held firmly back by a dam of triple-reinforced concrete. Humans had such small thoughts. Small minds, so hard to keep track of amidst the endless rush of psychic babble that the universe streamed with. To note them, to keep track of them as individuals would be mad, impossible – the human race was a collective. A thing. Individually, they were wonderful, but small, tiny, until one saw the sum of all those little streams as one. The human race was a typhoon when examined in whole. He was getting off track. He held his subconscious back as fiercely as he was able, and focused on physically talking, a process that was quite tricky when he was carefully keeping himself so separate from her.

"Imagine a door and open it, Rose. Let me in." It was a hard concept to get a grip on, the rivers of mentality. A non-telepathic being, one who could not see the sum of mentality couldn't grasp the rivers, the concepts, so they had to imagine. They couldn't give express permission, but implied permission was the same, so when a brief image flashed past him of an open door, so fleeting and small, he gently pressed the opening, moved his mentality into Rose's and slipped into her mind.

A shrill of emotions that weren't his own racked him briefly, and he threw them off with a slight mental shimmy, one of the first aspects of his training was to differentiate between his emotions and those of the person whose mind he entered. He was two minds at once. He thought twice, felt two emotions separately and simultaneously, was two people. He was the Doctor as much as he was Rose, the sum of thoughts of both of those two people, one keeping the expanse of time and memory at bay, and the other completely oblivious to the careful shielding that had been erected. That was always the most disconcerting part of the whole experience; the fact that they didn't know, that they couldn't see the dam holding back the crush. "If there's anything you don't want me to see, Rose, imagine a door and close it."

The Doctor part of him observed as the Rose part of him imagined a room with a whole string of doors, most open, but some firmly shut, others obviously locked and barred. A few had their doors slightly ajar as well, a sign that the Rose part of him didn't particularly want him to access those memories, but wouldn't hold him back if he tried. As a favour to that part of him, he projected an image for her, one of her Doctor standing in the room, walking slowly around it.

For the Doctor part of him, the experience was entirely different. Parts of the Rose's time stream shuttered off from him, parts of her mind wiped themselves from his access, names and faces instantly forgotten, never even known. The effect was like taking an eraser to a pencil mark – ghosts remained where something had been, but the image itself was gone. He slipped deeper into her mind, thinking as she did, bringing forth the Time Lor- no. There was something blocking that, a sense that that memory didn't make sense without accompaniment, like a backing tune with the melody missing. He slipped deeper, and drew what he was really looking for forward, slipping into the memory.

And it was a memory, fleeting impressions and inconsistent facts, nothing quite whole, but whole enough, the rest lost to time and space. He reconstructed it as best as his mind was able and slipped into it.

"Rose?"

It was Wednesday, the 30th of June, a bright, hot day in the peak of summer. The air-conditioner was buzzing slightly, struggling to keep up with the unexpected heat snap. It was the 10th day of soaring temperatures in a row and people were hot, sticky and irritable, Rose was all three. The paperwork in front of her was a blur of words and numbers, indefinable from the masses that she'd done before – a forgotten detail, superfluous and unimportant.

"Rose, are you even listening to me?"

"Sorry, Pete." She looked up then, away from the pen in her hands and straight into the blue eyed, ginger haired face of her surrogate father – Pete Tyler groaned at her. The eyes and the hair were stressed, the rest of the face slightly washed out as if it weren't important. Rose identified people by their eyes, the memory stressed.

There was a rush of details, exact wording forgotten, but the gist still there. Pete was explaining something, telling her something and the details rushed together to form one fact. He was telling her that she was required in interview. There was going to be a new batch of staff coming into Torchwood soon, and she was to be on the panel, given her experience. Displeasure came next, intense and gripping and unhappy. Rose didn't want to do this, but Pete had pulled rank.

The memory swam briefly and faded into another one, even less coherent and connected than the previous one. Sunday afternoon, the date uncertain, but a batch of faceless, undefined people stood before her, each trying to impress her, to convince her of their hiring potential. None of them knew the true reasoning behind Torchwood, they were here to impress her, and she was hard to impress. A woman stepped forward, big red stilettos sharpening on her otherwise bland feet. Featureless hands with long acrylic nails painted scarlet rapped upon the desk. Her hair flickered colours from brown to blonde and finally settled back on brown with a sort of dreamlike uncertainty, and her face was... hard to describe. Hazy. Forgotten. Just a woman with red nails and red shoes, even her clothing was undefined.

Simpering voice, high pitched and whiny, saying something that she'd only paid half-attention to, it sounded like a tape that had been played too many times, too crackly to sound like she had remembered any of what had been said.

And next; "Name?"

Oh, a flash and a detail omitted here, a ghost-like moment where he couldn't quite grasp the man, any details about him aside from the fact that he was there. The man's identity was a secret; but the Rose part of the Doctor's brain slipped as he looked up, directly into eyes of a deep cerulean blue, with slate flecks through them, familiar for some reason before they were chased away into Rose's memories. There had been freckles on the hidden memory's eyelids, faint and only there in the memory because Rose had been looking for them.

Confusion from the Doctor, and then painful focus. Sharp and there. The identity, the ghost, he had been given the job. The blue eyed, freckled one. And there had been yelling, weeks of anger aimed at her, coming squarely from Pete. But she had chosen him and there had been reasons, so many reasons that were carefully kept blank.

And she had helped him unpack. Where he had come from was uncertain, but the moving van had parked outside the apartment block he was living in, and she had spent a weekend of going up and down stairs, arms laden with boxes, and there was a blurry night, that started sharp, but became more and more foggy as the bottle of wine on the side table became more and more empty. All these favours for a stranger confused the Doctor, but it was as if this person was not a stranger, not to her, not with his sharp blue eyes that made her feel so sad, so strange like there was something impossibly wrong, that she couldn't reconcile.

It was late on the Sunday that she found it, an indiscrete pocket-watch buried beneath a pile of brown trousers. She asked him about it curiously, and his answer was completely devoid of any distinguishing vocal features or tone, but the words rang through clear as anything. "It belonged to my grandfather." The image shrugged. "He gave it to me in his will." She turned it over in her hands, silver on pink, studying the design, which was some sort of geometric pattern which the Doctor part of him rationalized she would have never been able to remember, if it was complex or unusual.

"Ever opened it?"

"No, why would I? It's broken. See?" The watch was taken from her hands into that of the image, and he had the feeling of being smiled at, dazzlingly, a smile that made the Rose part of his mind ache.

The watch was opened and there was gold and screaming.

Oh.

Oh.

The Doctor's eyes flew open as he hastily drew back from Rose's mind, his own head burning up with pain, encompassing his mind as he fell to his knees on the floor of Jack's study. His brain was itching so badly that it hurt, something was wrong, something that he only half understood he was sure, and if Rose had hidden the memories of who the Time Lord was from him, what good was he trying to find out? Ask her? He didn't think so; her denial was inevitable as the itching slowly clawed its way back from his head and his fingers unclenched themselves from his scalp.

He was on the floor, curled into a foetal position and he wondered absently when that had happened. Rose was calling his name frantically, and there were noises that indicated there were people crowded around the door. His head was swimming, buzzing with ideas, and he looked up at Rose, something akin to horror straining to escape the confines of his will to display on his face. It was in his eyes, though, he could tell by the way she recoiled away from him.

He sat up suddenly, jumped to his feet. "Oh, I'm THICK." He yelled, arms shooting out to grab Roses' shoulders, who was halfway into standing. "So THICK. I didn't realize it because I couldn't remember the feeling, but it was there all along and I should have recognized it!"

The itching in his head, which wasn't itching, not at all, but rather a part of his brain that he no longer used clamouring for attention. There hadn't been a need, in all these times, no need for him to use that bit of his brain because there were none left, he didn't think about counting other worlds, did he?

"Recognised what, Doctor?" Martha's voice demanded from the doorway, but he only had eyes for Rose, and the way she was staring at him, some mixture of fear and wonder on her face. He grinned at her, and kissed her exuberantly on the forehead in a manner that he hadn't done since he had regenerated. She baulked and stared at him openly in shock.

"Oh Rose Tyler! I should have worked it out ages ago, and the TARDIS did! OH, you beautiful, clever thing!"

"Doctor!" Insistent voices came as a cacophony from the doorway, and they attracted his attention for a moment, before he grinned disarmingly at the whole room.

"The Time Lords! Arrogant, stupid old bastards, the lot of them! Except me of course, but then, that goes without saying, I was always the exception that proved the rule."

"What the HELL are you talking about, Doctor?" Donna and Jack demanded in unison, and he turned to them, taking a step forward and smiling.

"What I'm talking about, everyone, is –"

Rose made a noise that sounded like a discrete cough, and he felt his emotions flicker for a moment. Jacks' clueless expression settled the matter for him, after all Rose hadn't told him about it yet, and if Rose hadn't told Jack, that meant she didn't want Jack to know. His face shifted to seriousness as he turned to look back at her, and watched as she discreetly gave a single shake of her head.

"Are you sure, Rose?" He said, stepping back towards her and cupping her face with one hand. She looked directly at him and nodded. He sighed explosively and dropped his hand, turning away from her and running his hand through his spikes and over his face. "I don't like it, just so you know."

He felt her move, then, and something between them changed in that moment, the moment when she slipped her hand in his and rested her other hand upon his elbow, bringing her head to gently rest on the back of his shoulder. "Thank you." He tensed, startled, before he relaxed and tightened his fingers around hers.

"Who's for drinks?" He said, cheerily. "I believe that's the human custom at the end of the day, isn't it?" And he turned towards Rose, laughter in his eyes, and tugged her out of the room.

"But Doctor, What..?"

He ignored Martha's protest as he looked directly into Roses' eyes, feeling more buoyant and light-headed than he had in a while, and not quite sure why. "Run." He said, softly, and dragged her from the room, laughing.

The bar was small and dim, and though the night had started off carefree, the somberity of the setting eventually got to her, and played on her mind in the gloomy bar interior. She could hear Jack and Ianto laughing and singing drunkenly along with one of the songs in the jukebox, Donna was gossiping away with Martha and Gwen, and Toshiko and Owen were making the awkward, stilted conversation of people who were unsure how to approach the other when they didn't quite know how the other person felt about them.

"Dame Rose, would you care for a dance?"

Rose looked up from the bottom of her pint glass to find the Doctor grinning at her, with his arm extended towards her, hand inviting. She smiled at him and extended her own to take it, and he gently pulled her over to the floor, as the band started up a mournful song on the piano. He drew her close, resting his head on top of hers, as she relaxed into his chest, bringing her hands up to rest on his shoulders as his took up position on the small of her back. She tried to remind her body that this was desperately dangerous, that she couldn't get close to the Doctor for so many reasons, but it wasn't listening to her – it was too busy melting into the Doctor's embrace, and after so many of her protests fell flat, she politely told her mind to shut up and decided to enjoy this stolen moment as much as she could.

This was the Doctor; the proper one, and she felt like she could relax, knowing that.

In the end you're all I want.

In the end you're all I need.

The band was decent, the song whispered over the microphone in a voice that was better suited to country, rather than the low purr that the lyrics and melody really deserved, but still charming in its way. As he dragged her towards him, the Doctor gently rocked her and wrapped his arms around her and she felt safe for the first time in a long time.

She felt his lips in her hair, pressing gentle kisses to her crown, nuzzling every now and again and she relaxed further into his chest, the dual beat of his hearts comforting her more than any lullaby. Kisses were new, kisses were something that the older Doctor had indulged in on occasion, purely platonic and gentle, but then the regeneration had happened, and he had looked younger and suddenly they were no longer appropriate in the relationship, but now, now he – Her breath caught as he dragged her closer to him, leaning down so that his lips were next to the shell of her ear. "Don't think, Rose. Now's not the time for thinking."

Any day now she'll appear...

With a truck stop souvenir

Just like she never left...

She'll whisper in my ear.

They swayed over the bar's small dance floor, both virtually still save for the gentle pull of breaths that Rose barely dared to take; encompassed as she was in sorrow and loneliness and courage and love she fought bitterly to deny, but was losing against for a second time, so much confusion running through her mind as the Doctor's hands stroked up and down her back soothingly in time with the music.

One of the Doctor's hands left her back and wrapped itself around strands of her hair as he pulled her into him, close and comforting and cool to the touch. She had forgotten the way they fitted so well, the way she felt like she belonged when he had his arms around her, like she was the most important thing in the world.

In the end you're all I want.

In the end you're all I need.

Rose started slightly when she realized that another voice had joined the growl of the singer, deep and ever so slightly off key, but not enough to be significantly noticeable. A purr, more than an actual attempt at singing, Rose thought, the Doctor was whispering only loud enough for her to hear, lips moving against her hair, chest reverberating slightly with the words. She looked up at him, startled, and he met her gaze, eyes dark with something that she didn't recognize, gracing her with an open, soul revealing look that shattered in a blink.

His hand came to cup her chin, and he caught her gaze with his, studying her face for something, but she didn't quite know what. And then it didn't matter as her eyes slid closed when he kissed them, and her forehead and her hair. "I missed you." She told him, though why she did she wasn't quite sure, but his 

breath caught and he grabbed her so tightly her chest could hardly move, and it was there, in that action that everything she knew he wouldn't say came to the forefront of what was between them.

She felt her breath catch, and fought against it, because all she'd done since he came back was cry and she didn't want to do it again. She wrapped herself in the strength that she'd developed in that other Torchwood, her protection, and she knew that he felt it.

We'll get close by the bar...

With The Salesmen after dark.

Just like you never left at all

He was still singing to her, soft and under his breath, and she thought that maybe she was privileged in this, to hear him sing, barely audible words whispered against her forehead where he rested his lips.

He pulled back slowly, and her eyes slid open to watch him as he was watching her. "Let go, Rose." He said quietly, still gently rocking her in time to the music. "You're safe here."

The loneliness and the fear and the tired ache in her bones that had kept her going these long years slowly swept out of her at those words, and she started to sob, cursing how well he knew her under her breath. He always had known exactly what to say to get her to react and she knew he wasn't ever above using that knowledge for her own good. He drew her close and cradled her as the music continued, but now he didn't sing along, merely held her and comforted her gently. He never told her to stop crying, even though the other customers at the bar were looking at them, her a mess and him rigidly strong, acting as her lifeline.

In the end you're all that I want.

In the end you're all that I need.

Never let me go... I'm complete

Any day now any day now... you'll see.

In the end you're all I want.

In the end you're all I need.

The dancers dissipated as the song ended, and he gently led her, one of his arms drawing her close to him, his other hand gently rubbing soothing circles on her back as he slowly walked backwards to one of the bars, sitting on a stool and pulling her against him. She sobbed into his jacket and he didn't mind the water ruining it, it seemed, as she blubbered.

"I'm sorry." She managed to choke out through the tears, but he shushed her and pulled her closer to him. "All I'm doing is crying. You must think I'm-"

"There's no need to apologize." He cut across her, and if anything that made her cry even harder. "You don't have to be strong anymore, Rose, if you don't want to be."

She clung to him, and had the feeling that her life depended on it. "I want to be." She whispered to the Doctor, to his ears and his only, "But I don't think I remember how." She hiccoughed slightly. "So much happened. So much changed. I don't think I'm the girl you remember, not anymore."

"You know," He whispered to her, dragging her into his lap and pressing her head against his shoulder with one of his deceptively strong hands. "Given what I saw today, I'd be more frightened if you hadn't been affected by it." He kissed her hair again, and she wondered at his penchant toward doing that now that they were reunited. It was like he was desperate to touch her, to reaffirm that she was there. It felt like it was something he'd always wanted to do, but had never had the chance before. "You remember Rose Tyler's smile still? She's got a cheeky grin that lights the skies more than a sun ever could. Have you seen it?"

She let out a watery, choked laugh and brought her hand up to his shoulder, sitting sideways in his lap, legs draped over his. He reached around behind her and dragged his greatcoat over them both, stroking the side of her face tenderly. "So what do you say, Rosie-Rose? Let me help you?"

"...That would be nice." She said, feeling exhausted and still hiccoughing slightly, even though her fit of sobs had stopped. The alcohol in her system was making her head foggy and the noises of the room were fading out as her eyelids drooped heavily. She was warm and comfortable and safe, wrapped in her Doctor's arms – her proper Doctor's arms, and he was brushing her hair away from her forehead and rubbing her back in soothing circles. She knew he still didn't know the half of it, and thoughts of the horror that was what Jack's team meant still chased themselves around her mind, but for now she felt she could let them go, if only for a little while.

The next song chased her into dreams, the lyrics floating through her mind before conscious thought left her.

She said "Would you lift me up? Lift me up again?

Like a hijacked aeroplane, let's go down in flames.

And burn the night away."

"I'll be back in a sec." Martha said, trying to ignore the fact that Rose was sitting in the Doctor's lap, and that he was looking entranced down at her, like the shock of her being there had finally settled; or that the fact she was back had finally sunk in. More likely the latter, Martha rationalized.

She felt guilty, she had to admit, that the sight of the two of them there made something curl in her stomach, some unbidden and unwanted remaining flare of jealousy snarled in her belly when she looked at the way he looked at her. She felt unfaithful to both her friends and to her fiancé when she felt that, 

because really, she had moved on from the Doctor. She didn't want to be in a romantic relationship with him anymore, and she had to compose herself before something unpleasant that she would later regret happened.

She made her steady way outside to recompose herself, waving at Jack and Ianto when she passed them, and stopping only briefly at the pool table to distract Owen from winning the game he was playing against Gwen. (He swore vehemently and she ignored him with a flair.)

She sighed and leaned on the pub wall, watching the traffic move at a leisurely pace around the Cardiff roads.

There, standing across the street, was the Doctor.

Martha did a double take, and looked back through one of the bar windows, to see the Doctor still sitting with Rose in his lap, and then she double checked across the road, to where the Doctor was standing quite contentedly, looking at the pub with a complacent expression. The Doctor across the road straightened and smiled at her, crossing and coming up to lean on the wall next to her.

"This is some kind of time thing, right? You're a Doctor from the past or the future, right?" Martha said, straightening and taking a nervous step away from the man in front of her.

He sighed, almost ironically, and folded his arms in front of him. The Doctor never folded his arms. "Not quite, Miss Martha Jones." He said, smiling.

And it was then she noticed – this Doctor, the one in front of her; he had blue eyes.

"Oh, and I'm sorry about this." He said, stepping towards her, as she took in a breath to call out to the people in the bar. "I'm so sorry."

He smiled vindictively.

"DOCT-" She was cut off mid scream, when he pointed some sort of device at her forehead, and she crumpled to the ground, knowing no more.

.

A/n: Yes, you're all very clever. Well done to everyone who figured that plot development out before.

I took out tow of the scenes of this chapter because it was really getting far too long for my liking. I could have taken out the shameless songfic, but I LIKE that song and it's so appropriate at this point in the fic. The Time Lord scene didn't fit in very well in this chapter, but it fits in niceley at some point soon, so it's going there instead

Next chapter: Martha's gone missing! How will the others react to this development? And finally, that confrontation between Rose and Jack that I've been promising for a few chapters. It's important, it will happen, dammit!

Leave a little review? –Rattles tin, as per usual- (I mean, two updates in a week! For me that's completely unheard of!)