Epilogue – When the Roads Meet

"Who can say when the roads meet, that love might be in your heart? . . . Only time." —Enya

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

For weeks, Rose had waited in this parallel universe, hoping the Doctor would find a way through. And when she'd finally heard his voice, whispering in her dreams, she'd known, somehow, that he wouldn't be coming for her. The valiant child had died, leaving a woman in her place. Now she understood pain and devastating loss. Now she wore a black leather jacket, just like her first Doctor had, a barrier against the world, but it didn't keep out the icy wind that blew along the beach in Norway.

The Doctor stood before her, a hologram, an image projected across time and space to tell her goodbye. It reminded her of another hologram, and another Doctor who'd said goodbye and told her to have a fantastic life.

This couldn't be happening. How could she face the world without a hand to hold?

"I love you," she said, hating the way her voice pitched upward and cracked. She didn't want him to see her like this, with her eyes red from crying and her face swollen from grief. She didn't want his last vision of her to be of a sobbing wreck. He deserved better than that. But her breaths came out shuddering, and tears continued to fall from her eyes. She couldn't help it—she would never see the Doctor again, and that thought alone was the only thing that could break her.

The Doctor didn't seem especially pleased at the thought, either. His throat convulsed as he swallowed and tried to smile, just a little, and his eyes looked at her, fathomless and dark. "Quite right, too."

Now that she ought to have expected, the cocky git. What she didn't expect was for him to try and return the sentiment, looking desperate and vulnerable.

"And I suppose . . . it's my last chance to say it." His chest moved as he let out the breath he'd been holding. "Rose Tyler. . . ."

And before he could say anything further, the hologram vanished, leaving her alone on a cold beach. The Time Lord had misjudged the time they had to say goodbye, and with that miscalculation had robbed them both of any sort of closure. The pain of it nearly doubled Rose over. It hurt as though she'd been physically assaulted, but the agony of a broken heart would leave no bruises.

She fell to her knees on the damp sand. From far away she could hear her mum's voice, but she couldn't respond. It hurt even to breathe.

But as she curled up on herself, something unexpected happened. She heard the Doctor's whisper on the wind, calling her name. When she raised her head, she felt the phantom brush of his fingers against her temple . . . and then she remembered.

The TARDIS, where it shouldn't be, after their disastrous trip to a 51st century spaceship. The Doctor, older and sadder, wearing a blue suit. A paradox, carefully manipulated to give him three chances to be with her after losing her to this universe. A century of loneliness. A casual suggestion that turned out to be the key to impossible. . . .

She gasped with the surge of hope that came with memory. And then she heard an all-too-familiar sound mixing with the crash of the waves on the beach. Tears blurred her vision, but she didn't need to see clearly to recognize the solid blue form of the TARDIS.

And then he stood in front of her, his hair touched with grey and the edges of his eyes marked with age and the weight of so many years without her. But it didn't matter, because he'd come back for her, and her hand still fit perfectly in his.

"I remember," she whispered, as he hugged the breath out of her. "Those three days, I remember them."

He grinned and loosened his grasp enough to look at her. "Of course you do. I had to hide the memories 'til now, because it isn't safe to know too much about your own future, and you had months to go with the younger me. But I left a trigger, so that once it was safe—once you were here, and we'd said goodbye—the barrier would fall and you'd remember everything. So that you'd know that I was on my way."

Her time trapped on Pete's world had been filled with misery, and she started to chide him for letting her worry for so long, but then she realized how long he had been without hope of seeing her again . . . and it made her few weeks seem like nothing. So, instead of scolding the Doctor, she hugged him. And when she kissed him, it felt as though she'd never done so before, and as if she'd been doing it all her life.

"There's just one thing," she said quietly. "I couldn't make sense of it before, what with those memories hidden, because you and I had never . . . but now I know that we have."

"Mmm. Indeed we have." He smirked in a way that made Rose blush and duck her head.

"It's just. . . ." She stopped and fidgeted with her hair. From the corner of her eye, she could see her mum and dad and Mickey approaching, and she certainly didn't want them to overhear this. So she pushed on, despite the blood rushing to her face. "You remember that fairy tale? The one about Cinderella, only it was really a bloke?"

"Yup. The one with the festival every year, everyone wearing masks. Should take you to one of those, sometime. Those Britons knew how to party."

Rose slid her hands from the Doctor's shoulders, down to his chest. Her fingers played with his lapels. "Remember you said that it wasn't a dropped glass slipper that proved who he was?"

"Be a bit silly to make a shoe entirely out of glass, now wouldn't it? On the fourth year he went to the festival and. . . ." He blinked. And blinked again. His jaw fell, but he said nothing. He shut his mouth, and then he opened it again. When he finally managed to speak, her name came out rather strangled and high-pitched. "Rose . . . ?"

"Here I was thinking I must've got really drunk and seduced Mickey after Canary Wharf, but it was you, all along."

"Mickey?" he yelped indignantly, his voice rising in pitch even further.

Blithely ignoring him, she went on, "Definitely explains a few things: the doctors at Torchwood said my hormone levels were much too high for sixteen weeks gone. Closer to six or seven months, and since I'm not quite showing yet . . . well, let's just say they were getting a bit too interested in my case. Must be Time Lord biology: so superior that it takes twice as long to grow a baby."

She grinned, highly amused as he stared at her, nonplussed and speechless. She didn't ever want to forget the expression on his face—a perfect blend of awe, shock, disbelief, and euphoria. He shook his head, and then wrapped his arms around her.

"Rose Tyler," he whispered against her ear, "Seems to me that we've some unfinished business, you and I."

"Have we?" She pulled back to meet his gaze, and his eyes sparkled with the light of a thousand setting suns.

"That's right. Now, unless I'm very much mistaken . . . I believe you said something about forever?"