How To Take Chances

Disclaimer: Nothing is mine.

--

If he were on Earth, he'd call this the early hours of the morning. He's finally managed to persuade Donna – nervous, restless and still full of unanswerable questions he cannot even begin to address – to go to bed after her ordeal on Shan Shen, but she's not the only one who needs rest.

Despite the danger, despite his mind racing with the insistent questions competing for attention against the hopes he dares not voice, he finds himself slipping into a fitful, uneasy sleep under the harsh red glare of the central console.

When he opens his eyes again, the day is clear and bright, the lines of the world crisper and more focussed than the images his few rare dreams usually offer him. He is outside, watching himself (a fairly common occurrence, considering the nature of his day-to-day life) laugh with Jack and Martha on the grass of a planet that looks suspiciously like Earth. They seem to be waiting for something. The door to the TARDIS is only slightly ajar, but the light playing off Donna's hair as she stands in the doorway is very clearly green. And there, right there, coming out of the TARDIS and squeezing past Donna to get to a version of himself that doesn't seem to see quite how impossible all this is, that's –

The ground beneath him is solid, and when he reminds himself to breathe again, the air passing through his lungs is stable and clean. The universe isn't ending. It feels like it never will.

And yet Rose Tyler is standing not ten metres in front of him, nonchalantly holding his hand as though she'd never let it go.

His own present hand twitches, nothing but air passing through the gaps between fingers that were quite literally designed to fit with hers.

It's been too long.

When Donna yells out to the others and dives back into the TARDIS to retrieve her forgotten phone, Jack and Martha go on ahead while the Doctor and Rose stay behind. He's wearing a blue tie, he notices, that really doesn't go with his blue suit. Martha walks right past without even looking around, but Jack's frowning gaze lingers for a second too long on what should be empty space beneath the inconspicuous tree opposite the TARDIS. When he blinks, the frown disappears and he offers an arm out to Martha (she can't quite reach to hook her own through it comfortably), calling over his shoulder for the others to get a move on – "We won't wait up!"

He and Rose, though, the Doctor notes, do not seem to be in any kind of rush. In frowning back at Jack and Martha and wondering exactly how he is here – and, indeed, if he is here at all – the Doctor has somehow missed the manoeuvre that ended in Rose's back against the wall next to the TARDIS, one of her arms slung lazily over his shoulder and her other hand fiddling gently with that nasty blue tie.

Perhaps he won't throw that one away, after all.

He's kissing her now, painfully slowly to watch, one hand under her chin and the other somewhere around her side, obscured by his coat and the shape of their bodies as they shrink together, and he knows he's definitely never done this. Oh, he should have done, he is all too aware that he should have taken the chance while they still had the time, but these are the moments he never quite gave her.

Perhaps he is uselessly projecting current events onto the timeless figures of a dream, but they look almost as though they've only just found one another again and can't bear to spend any more time regretting words unsaid and things undone. If he ever sees her again, if if if – can he dare to hope? Are those two words still what they were all those years before, a message from Rose to prove she can find her way back to him? – he knows only then will he be able to push aside his years of tradition and loneliness to make such a scene possible.

Rose's foot slides up the wall behind her as she pushes closer, still clutching at his tie. Even standing ten metres away as a different, lonelier man, he can feel her delighted smile against his lips. At this distance, though, his mouth does not curve up in response but instead stiffens into a harsh, straight line, and he is left to regret that his predominant memories of her are hopes that came to nothing.

By the time Donna's footsteps echo back down the ramp towards the door, he is almost managing to pretend that it doesn't ache to watch himself live out the life he never let them have. The footsteps come hurtling out of the door and the Doctor watches as he hurriedly disentangles himself from a rather pink-cheeked Rose, hastily jumping back a step and moving both hands to her waist to swing her around away from the wall and pretend they were just hugging all along.

Donna doesn't even raise an eyebrow. The Doctor has a feeling that in a world such as this, she'd be far too used to such situations to smile indulgently at them anymore.

When she hurries on after Jack and Martha (now two barely visible specks turning the corner a good couple of minutes up the road), Rose threads her fingers through his once more. Over by the tree, he clenches his fists ever-so-slightly, trying and failing to tear his eyes away and wake up as the other him stops in his tracks and steals one, two, three quick kisses. They delight in what they think is their successfully inconspicuous behaviour until Donna finally gives up and calls over her shoulder in fond exasperation.

"I can still hear you, you know!"

The Doctor's ears go pink, but Rose just laughs.

He feels her come silently up beside him before he sees her. She is barely there in the corner of his eye, standing by his side to watch the happier pair progress up the road. Her back is straighter, her arms folded. Her blonde hair rushes about her face in the wind just as it always used to.

Her voice is distant, too full of echoes to be there with him, too much like a whisper in his ear for her to be standing where she is. She is choked with tears in a tone he'd almost forgotten. He's not sure if she even opened her mouth. She certainly doesn't look at him.

Up in the road, they have caught up with Donna now, walking and laughing with her, Rose hanging off the Doctor's arm.

"That's gonna be us one day," she says under the tree, or perhaps she doesn't. "Just you wait."

When he turns around, she's gone.