Dedicated to my wonderful beta readers, LostInWho and JohnPaulGeorgeandRingo!

Huge thanks to LostInWho for beta reading my terrible, terrible first draft. She caught a thousand spelling/grammar/punctuation/mechanical problems and one frankly humongous character interaction problem in the plot, and I will be forever grateful!

JohnPaulGeorgeandRingo also helped me IMMENSELY by getting my dialogue (and much of Rose's personality) back on track, by pointing out where I sounded hopelessly American, and by getting me to actually describe places instead of just saying "it's a place."

Setting: Cardiff Rift, 2007.

The Doctor knew he had been spending too much time pining over Rose when he started to hallucinate her walking around the console room.

It was an overcast Friday, a little before noon, and the TARDIS was parked at Roald Dahl Plass, its usual place for a rift energy fuel up. The Doctor had been hiding out in his study, a room Martha hadn't yet discovered. Adventuring with the bright young doctor-in-training was usually a good way to keep himself from dwelling too long on the things he couldn't change, but right now he didn't really feel up to it. He just needed to be alone for a bit to tinker and think without making her ask more questions he didn't want to answer, or worse yet, making her feel like she wasn't good enough for him because she wasn't Rose.

To be perfectly honest, what with getting her stuck for three months in 1913 and then immediately getting her stuck again in 1969, he was amazed that she hadn't gotten fed up and left already. If he didn't shake this melancholy soon, he might finally end up pushing her too far, and end up all alone again. And that Donna Noble woman had been right – he wasn't good on his own.

It was in the middle of this moody reverie that the panel on the nearest wall chimed softly to let him know someone from outside had entered the TARDIS.

He glanced up from his tinkering, surprised. Normally the ship didn't bother to inform him when Martha came and went, and he couldn't imagine who else would be able to just walk right in.

The Doctor frowned and pulled a fold-away remote viewing monitor from the wall to check the live video-feed in the console room. When he saw who it was, he froze, dropping the half-disassembled Drahvin power converter he'd been working on with a clatter.

Rose Tyler, who he knew without a doubt was stuck forever in a parallel universe without a snowball's chance on Venus of ever returning to this world, was kneeling on the grate that served as the floor in the TARDIS console room, pulling up one of the panels with a hook he kept under the console for that purpose.

The Doctor reached forward from his chair and shakily grasped the monitor with both hands. She was back! No, no, wait, she couldn't be back. That was impossible! Wasn't it? It was! He knew he had tried everything. He'd spent two full years of his subjective linear timeline trying every single mad scheme he could think of to get her back before finally admitting to himself that the best he could manage was a holographic goodbye message.

Maybe this footage was old. Could the TARDIS' main computers be acting up, recycling old video footage from over a year ago? He yanked the control panel out of its slot in the wall and pulled up a systems check. Circular Gallifreyan writing informed him that all systems were performing normally. The TARDIS' energy cells were currently recharging on rift energy at 24%.

He whirled around again to the live video feed, dumbstruck, and stared at what could only bea sign that he'd gone round the bend. Meanwhile, his impossible former companion pulled up the grate, set it down to her right, and reached under the floorboards for one of the chests of gizmos and old knicknacks that he stored under there. She rummaged through it for a few seconds, quickly managed to locate the Argolin mobile neural interface array, and held it up to inspect it in the light of the time rotor.

That was when Martha abruptly walked smack-dab into the middle of the hallucination and jumped about a foot in the air. Her voice echoed out from the audio feed in the study.

"What the – how…? Who are you? How did you get in here?" she yelped.

Rose stared open-mouthed at Martha for a second. On the other side of the TARDIS, still staring gobsmacked at the monitor in his study, the Doctor shot to his feet.

She was real! Hallucinations didn't interact with real people!

"Martha?" he heard Rose ask, bewildered. "It's me, Rose. We met, remember? But what are you…" Her voice trailed off as she looked around, really looked around at the tiny differences in detail in her surroundings, and comprehension dawned on her face. "Oh bloody hell, I've gone an' done it now." Eyes wide, she stumbled backwards down the ramp and bolted out of the TARDIS.

The Doctor vaulted over the armchair he'd just been sitting in and tore out of the room like a shot, careened through the corridors, flew through the console room (past a very confused Martha), and skidded out into the street. He paused only a second to look to see which way she'd gone, and, seeing her disappear round a corner down the street to his left, broke into an all-out sprint. She was fast, something he'd been glad of during their years of running from various monsters, but his longer legs allowed him to keep up and even gain on her slowly.

"Rose! Rose, wait!" he shouted desperately as she continued to sprint down Lloyd George Avenue.

"Oh, bugger," Rose mumbled as she ran, mentally kicking herself. Of course, he'd have noticed her. Instinctively, she'd headed north toward Canal Park (now she remembered parking there), but the wide pedestrian walkway lined with saplings and low shrubs on one side and the long, unbroken wall of pale brick apartments on the other offered no hiding places for her to duck into. He was gonna catch her at this rate. She kept running, but slowed down just enough to turn and shout back. "Doctor, you can't! You're gonna cross your own timeline! You have to go back-"

She caught a glimpse at his face then, and the forlorn abandonment she saw there brought her to a reluctant standstill. Already a bit out of breath from her run, she turned back and shook her head at her own stupidity as she headed toward him. Oh, all right, she thought to herself, Sorry, Universe, but I can't very well leave him looking like that. You'll just have to deal with it this time.

The Doctor, getting his second wind now that he could see she was coming back, collided into her at top speed with an ecstatic grin on his face and swooped her up into a spinning hug.

"Rose, you're back, you came back, that's brilliant!" He set her down, but continued to crush her against his chest like a drowning man clutching a life preserver.

"My own Rose, defender of Earth, always doing the impossible. How did you do it? Or how will you do it, rather, if, as you said, I'm crossing my own timeline?"

"Doctor," she said, her smile pressed into the shoulder of his trench coat. Despite knowing that she shouldn't, and knowing that she had her own version of the Doctor just a little ways down the road, it was hard not to respond to his excitement, even though most of her adrenaline rush was based on the thought that the time-space continuum might rip apart at the seams any moment.

Her arms around his shoulders, Rose gave him a squeeze and then pulled back enough for them to look at each other.

"Doctor, I can't tell you anything. You aren't supposed to meet me yet." She suspected she'd just torn a hole in the fabric of space-time somewhere, but he was grinning ear to ear like a loon, and she felt her mouth twitch up at the corners despite herself. "Oh, but we've really done it now."

"You're from my future," he said. "You said 'yet.'"

"Yeah, I did."

"That means I'm going to see you again," he insisted for confirmation. "Am I here with you now?" He glanced around, scanning for some rival future self who might come any second to steal Rose away again.

"Yeah, but… Look, that's Martha in there, yeah? And she's actin' like she's never seen me before, which means you're still travelin' with her, and that means I've just botched everything up, big time. You've got to go back." She looked around the wide, smoothly paved thoroughfare uneasily. There wasn't much foot traffic yet, and the street was luckily mostly empty. "There could be reapers here any second just for telling you that much."

"You walked right into the TARDIS. I can't believe it." He seemed altogether too unconcerned, almost giddy. He bounced up and down like he might float away right off the surface of the Earth any second.

Rose wondered if maybe he'd been a little more emotionally unbalanced during his travels with Martha than the later him had let on.

"I did, yeah, but that's 'cos we always used to park there, and I forgot you set us down about half a mile away this time. An' anyway, I didn't think to wonder if there could be more than one TARDIS in the same place at the same time." She poked him in the chest with a fond but serious expression. "What were you thinking, landing twice in the same town on the same date? I mean, you're the one always goin' on about not being allowed to cross into one's own timeline once you're 'part of established events,' or whatever."

"Yeah, you'd think I'd manage to avoid that," the Doctor agreed as he continued to beam at Rose, much too happy to care about the details for the moment.

"Well, what are we gonna do? I don't want to cause a paradox. An' I suppose I'd better give you this back, too." She tried to hand him the neural interface array. "I meant to fetch it from our TARDIS – I mean the one in my time."

"Right, yeah," he hummed, ignoring the gizmo she offered. He preferred to keep his arms where they were, wrapped around her waist and clasped behind her back.

"Doctor."

"Yes?"

"I'm glad that you're happy to see me," she smiled sympathetically, "But can you concentrate for a minute? You do get that we might be rewriting our own history, here, yeah?"

"Absolutely."

"You have to take this and go back. I might be changing my own past just talkin' to you. I know I'm changing your past. You never once mentioned this, an' you definitely would've said."

"Well, that's all right. Future me probably just forgot the whole thing."

"What d'you mean, forgot? You mean like amnesia? Can Time Lords get amnesia?"

"When I need to, I can wipe my own memory. I probably end up doing that. That'd explain why your me doesn't remember there being any risk of running into this me here at this point in time and figured it'd be safe to land here for a refueling. He's got no idea he was already here."

"You can do that? Just forget, on purpose, just like that?"

"Course, I can! 'Do it all the time, in fact. Well, not all the time. Just when I run into my past and future selves. And I try to avoid that – 's not good for the space-time continuum. Not good for my brain, either, come to think of it." He frowned slightly.

"You run into your selves a lot, then?" she asked, bemused.

"No. Well, maybe. I wouldn't really know, would I? I might have met three future me's last week and wiped my own memory each time."

"Well, maybe you'd better go back to the TARDIS and do that, then. I don't want to risk the timelines any more than we already have."

The pain and longing from earlier reappeared on the Doctor's face. He looked at her like a man who'd just won the lottery, only to accidentally drop the ticket down a sewer drain.

"Rose, I don't have to go yet. Not when I just—it's been so long, Rose, and I thought I'd never—" He trailed off and raised his hand to tuck a few stray blonde strands of hair behind her ear. "Just stay with me a little while. A few hours. Tops! Then I promise I'll go back and forget everything."

Rose hesitated, glancing over his shoulder, past his TARDIS, where she knew another alleyway was concealing a second one – a new ship grown from a coral clipping of the first, not the future version of this Doctor's TARDIS like he was certainly assuming. And a little ways down the road behind her, in a closed-down pub, there waited a half-human Doctor who, she mused, you could also say was grown from a clipping of the old one. She didn't know what would happen if the old Doctor met the new new new Doctor and realized he wasn't a full Time Lord anymore. She wished their Pete's World cell phones were compatible with the towers in this universe so she could give her Doctor a call and ask him what to do. As it was, she supposed it was better not to lead the old Doctor back to her current one, and right now he looked like he'd follow her anywhere like a lost puppy.

"Yeah, um, I suppose we can do that… for a little while," she finally conceded a little uncertainly.

He looked so relieved that she felt almost guilty about not leaping tearfully into his arms the moment they'd met. But after all, from her perspective, she had just seen him five minutes ago when he'd asked her to run back and fetch a part from the TARDIS. Instead, she couldn't help thinking uncomfortably about how, two years from now in his timeline, he would get this exact same astounded, deliriously happy look on his face, run toward her, and immediately get shot by a Dalek. Then he'd inadvertantly cause a human-Time Lord metacrisis and have to send her away again with his duplicate, this time for good.

And now here she was unintentionally misleading his past self into thinking everything was going to be just fine. She tried not to let any of this show through shining eyes as she hugged him around the neck again.

"I missed you, y'know," she told him softly. "During the time we were apart. I never stopped looking for a way back through." Her Doctor, the metacrisis one, was technically here hugging her right now too, she reminded herself firmly. It was his past she was holding as much as it was the other one's, since this was before part of his consciousness split off into that old hand. It would be silly to cry over the future of this younger Doctor when she knew one half of him was going to end up staying with her. It was a glass half full kind of situation. Just don't focus on the half that walked away.

"And you found me," he smiled reassuringly, catching the faint sorrow that hid behind her words and misreading its cause. He bowed his head into the side of her neck, breathing in the scent of her hair. "You've got me back, in your time."

She tried not to hear the rest of that thought in her mind: Yeah, I've got one of you. But one of you didn't get me.