Warning: None, actually - there are no spoilers for Season 4 anywhere in this story. It's canon all the way up to the end of Season 3 of New Who ("Last of the Time Lords"). You may read without fear.

There are, however, lots of spoilers for Part One of the Crossroads series, Reflections. You will want to read that one first.

Disclaimer: Not mine. It's very sad, I agree. If it looks familiar, it's because it's also on LJ and Teaspoon.
Chapter Summary: Time moves at different rates, which isn't exactly comforting for Rose – and definitely not comforting to the Doctor.

Chapter One: Time Passing

Somewhere orbiting a small, insignificant, unnamed planet in the Delta Cluster, a blue police box spun lazily, not moving in any direction but around. Police boxes don't tend to have emotions, but this one was content. Part of her contentment came from her occupants within; her Doctor and her Rose, who were at that moment sitting on the jump seat in the console room, pressed together and arms at rest as they watched the latest series of photographs from the parallel world. The Tardis stretched languid telepathic limbs out, half-inclined not to look for the danger that surely lurked around the next bend. She wouldn't have wanted to disturb her people inside. Luckily, there was little to be found, and she continued to spin, content to simply be.

The Tardis knew such small moments were not guaranteed, just as she knew they might not come again. She continued to spin, and waited.

"It's funny, isn't it," said Rose, looking at the Tardis screen, where they'd uploaded the new photos from Jackie. "Just a year here, and it's four years later there. When I left, the babies couldn't even sit up – well, according to Mum, they couldn't, and now she's sending me pictures of them heading off to school."

"Parallel worlds are like that," said the Doctor. "Is Molly sticking her tongue out at you?"

"I think she's doing it to Pete, not me."

"Looks like you, she does."

"I think Donald does more," said Rose, and leaned back against him, resting her head on his shoulder. "Every story Mum tells, I remember happening. Except I was there the first time around. Half of what she tells me, I've forgotten I knew. Oh, there's Donald. Mum always says he's just like me, running off and getting into scrapes, and Molly has to rescue him at least once a day."

"Would that make me Molly?"

"I rescue you just as often."

"And you look better in a dress."

She laughed, and kept her focus on the images flickering on the screen. "Molly in school uniform."

"She'll be a tall one. Blonde hair like yours."

"Mine hasn't been that blonde in ages."

Rose fell silent, and he looked down at her. She was lost in thought, and he touched her on the cheek, a signal they'd worked out after several months of false starts. He sensed her acquiescence, and closed his eyes.

It only took a moment for the purple edges of his consciousness to overlap with the silvery-turquoise of hers. There weren't words – there never were, her telepathic powers weren't even close to that range of capability – and he would never be able to access everything if they only overlapped a bit, but he was able to see what was on the surface. Of course, it was a two-way street; she could see his thoughts just as easily, at least the ones he didn't keep safely locked away in the back of his mind, where she couldn't reach. Images and feelings rushed between them before he pulled the edges back from hers, though he kept his arm around her. When they had broken the link, he leaned forward and rested his lips on her hair – not a kiss so much as a gentle caress.

Rose went very still; he could feel the tension creep along her limbs. "You owe me a penny," she said.

"I'll pay up later. Nothing will happen to them, Rose. They probably won't even notice anything particular about that day. Might think of you a little more often, but to them, you've been gone four years already."

Rose kept her focus on the screen. "I wish I'd asked Mum the date yesterday. Molly and Donald had been in school for two months when you pulled me through the crossroads, and here's pictures of their first day. I know time moves faster there – do you think it'll be another week, and then they'll pass that mark? When they start really living without me?"

"They are living without you, love," said the Doctor, keeping his voice as kind as he could even though the words were harsh. "They won't suddenly remember you'd been there an extra four years."

"But you don't really know, do you? You're just guessing. You haven't done this before."

She didn't notice him wince, just a bit, but even that memory, the one he'd never told her, remained safe from her for now. "I don't reverse time as a daily course of action, no, but I'm making an extremely educated Time Lord-me guess. There is no reason to think that just because I collapsed their time once, it will spontaneously do so again with little or no interference from me."

She huffed and rested her head against his chest. The photographs were cycling through Jackie and Pete now, Jackie showing off her garden, and Pete exhibiting the trellis he'd constructed for her. "I'm going to watch them grow old, aren't I? If they're aging four years for every one of mine – I mean, it'll be a little like I'm immortal. They'll grow older and die, and I'll still be younger than I really ought to be."

The Doctor slipped his hand over hers. "Rose—"

"Only – I didn't think of it until just now." She looked at him, her cheek rubbing against his suit coat. "That's what you meant, isn't it? You once said how hard it was to watch people wither and grow old, when you stayed young forever. I thought I understood you a little, but I—"

"You were young," said the Doctor gently. He brushed his fingers through her hair. "You really did think you'd be young forever."

"Something like that, I suppose." She burrowed into his coat, pressing her cheek against the lapel. "Do – do you think it was the right thing to do? Not telling Mum about the nanogenes?"

"It wouldn't have done very much good, would it? Just give her a reason to worry. Another reason, I mean. I suspect there's things she doesn't tell you, either."

"Nothing big like me growing another heart, or suddenly developing a Gallifreyan physiology."

"Not quite Gallifreyan."

"Close enough, you said, to think that I'll live just as long as a true Gallifreyan, maybe short ten years, and close enough that my mind works like a Gallifreyan, absent an understanding of astrophysics." Rose bit her lip. "Did I tell you what she asked me the last time? She wanted to know if I might – never mind."

"No, what?"

Rose squeezed her eyes shut. Sharing images was a two-way street, as was asking permission. Not that he'd requested she ask, but Rose felt it rude to go barging into his mind when he had to knock on the proverbial door of hers. So she reached up and touched his cheek, just one small slightly warmer finger, and waited for his response. As always, it came, welcome and opening, and she let the purple and silvery-turquoise just barely touch, just long enough to give him one very specific image, gleaned from her memories of Molly and Donald as babies, before she retreated again, letting her finger drop back down to play with the buttons on his coat.

The Doctor, startled, took a moment to answer. "Oh."

"It's all right, I gave her a line about how it's not like that," said Rose. "I don't think she believed me, so I told her humans and Time Lords aren't compatible, and I think that might buy me a little time. She'll probably start in on it again next month."

"That's not true, you know."

"All right, three weeks." Rose sat back up. "Maybe Pete could just get her pregnant again, that would get her off my back about it."

"That's not what I meant about it not being true," the Doctor corrected her. "Although I agree she'll bring it up in three weeks, not four."

Rose blinked. "You said snogging me wouldn't get me pregnant."

"It won't."

Her temper flared just a little as she reminded herself that it had been a bad idea to bring up her Mum's conversation. "Well, then, compatible doesn't really come into it, does it? Since you haven't even tried to snog me the past six months, have you? Don't think I don't know you finished all your testing and comparing on your blood samples ages ago. Maybe Time Lords do get pregnant with snogs, Doctor, is that what scares you the most?"

He groaned. "Rose—"

She almost jumped off the seat, but he took her by the arms and pulled her to him, letting his lips fall on hers in a kiss that was more possessive and insistent than gentle. She was right – the reason he hadn't kissed her in six months had everything to do with the results from his infernal tests. It wasn't that he didn't want to kiss Rose – oh, Rassilon, how he wanted to do what he was doing just now, tasting and licking and sucking and touching; the feel of her body pressed to his now; the way her mouth tasted of peppermint and cinnamon. If he wasn't careful, he could easily forget why he'd stopped.

She certainly had no objection to the kiss; Rose responded to his show of possession in kind, slipping her fingers into his hair and pulling him down into her, in a battle of control and contrast. Her mouth was just a bit warmer than his, and her blood was quicker. Through the telepathic link that inevitably came with a kiss, he could feel a familiar heat rising in her as she pushed back against him with equal force, nearly crawling up onto his lap, pushing herself so close to him, overlapping their thoughts so thoroughly, he couldn't tell if he'd slipped his fingers under the hem of her blouse of his own volition, or if she'd told him to do it.

It was when Rose let her hands drift down from his hair to the collar of his Henley, the odd warming spark he felt as her skin touched his – he remembered. He couldn't stop the groan which escaped from his throat as reality came knocking, and Rose answered in half whimpering moans, completely misunderstanding his disappointment for lust, and emphasizing his need to stop them both. He managed to wrap his fingers around her arms in a half-mad attempt to push her away, but couldn't find the heart to end the kiss before she was ready.

They were both gasping for air when it was over. The Doctor rested his forehead against Rose's; he could feel her entire body trembling against his, but even with their thoughts overlapping, he couldn't tell if it was from excitement or nerves. Her thoughts were in complete turmoil, and he took advantage of her momentarily displacement to speak. "It has nothing to do with want," he said, his voice rasping. "It has more to do with an excess of change."

Rose pulled back sharply; her lips were dark pink, and her cheeks were pinker. He felt her thoughts recede just as quickly, like waves rolling down the beach. The hurt on her face was unmistakable. "Is that why you stopped kissing me? Too complicated for you, isn't it, a relationship like that."

"No – that's not what I mean."

"Then what do you mean?"

"I like kissing you, Rose," he snapped.

"Funny way of showing it, when you stop entirely for six months," countered Rose.

"That's why I had to stop kissing you."

"That doesn't make any sense!"

"That's what I'm trying to explain!"

She pushed against him half-heartedly, more to goad him than to actually get away. "You're doing a piss-poor job of it."

"You asked if I liked companions without complications, I told you I didn't!"

"That wasn't the real question!"

"Rose, I didn't read that much when you showed me a baby cradle, you're going to actually have to ask me something!"

"What am I doing here?" she asked, almost angry. "Missed me, you said. Lonely, you said. Well, I'm here, and you accost me in the corridors every so often, and then it's back to the next adventure and no end in sight. And I like the adventure, more than I thought I would when I came back, but Doctor, really! You can't just snog a girl senseless in the rain one day and the next refuse to so much as brush by her in the corridor! I'm twenty-two or twenty-six or maybe I'm thirty, to Mum, and maybe—" She pulled away then. "I – oh, never mind!"

Rose managed to pull away successfully then, and ran from the console room deep into the Tardis. He was suddenly cold, where she'd been pressed, and the Doctor blinked for a moment, eyes on the door where she'd gone. He was enormously clever, and he could travel through time and space, rescue planets, and restore civilizations to their proper order; he had managed to save queens and kings and authors and monsters from their own self destruction. He could talk anyone into or out of anything, and indeed talking was one of the things he was best at doing.

Even with all this, and despite a year of good intentions, he had never quite managed to sit and have the proper conversation with Rose he'd promised himself he would. They didn't ever truly share the entire wealth of their minds with each other, so it had been all too easy to keep it from her. There were some things he had no intention of ever telling her – the year with the Master, the woman he'd met in 1913, or what had happened the first time he'd seen a crossroads – but there were things that she was entitled to know. It was easy to tell himself that she wasn't ready for the information anyway, that she was too thoroughly enjoying their gallivanting across the universe, that they had plenty of time to settle down later, since she'd live a century before the end.

Only – that image of a cradle showed that Rose was very likely very ready for that conversation. The Doctor wasn't certain if Rose realized it, but the cradle she'd shown him had not only not been empty, it had two very familiar figures standing on either side gazing in. The Doctor understood that the baby inside was based on Molly, but the figures beside the cradle were most certainly not Jackie and Pete Tyler.

The Doctor sighed. Parallel worlds or no, time passed too quickly some days. He hopped off the jump seat and went to find Rose.