Doctor Who © BBC

River Song, future companion, says: "Beware the spoilers!"

SPOILERS FOR "Journey's End"

Similar Differences

The differences were slight. It was a warmer palm, a slower, singular heartbeat, but still that look of uncertainty. He was afraid, she realized. He must feel like she had upon arriving to this universe, alone but for her family. They were his family now. Maybe she and her mum had been his family since his regeneration and that oh-so domestic Christmas dinner. She looked up at his face and found him staring back at her, as he often used to when he thought she wasn't looking. He couldn't hide his emotions as well, and she wasn't sure if that was an improvement or not. Did he really have fewer lines around his eyes, or was that just her imagination creating differences, desperately clinging onto the idea that they are not the same?

"How the hell are we getting home?"

They broke each other's gaze to find Jackie standing with her arms crossed. However, she didn't have an angry look on her face, and Rose thought that it was probably for her benefit.

"Use my mobile, Mum. Tell Dad to bring the helicopter."

She tossed her mum the cellular phone and turned back to the Doctor. Was he John now? Would he use his alias, or choose a proper name like a proper human? More to the point, could she make herself call him anything other than 'Doctor'? Would he expect her to? He needed an entire identity now. He needed a birth certificate, medical records, and school records. They would need to sculpt an entire history from scratch. He could be anyone he wanted to be. Anyone except the person he used to be.

She looked at the hand holding hers. It was the same hand. It was the third hand, technically. He was here, on this cursed beach, holding her hand as if she were a lifeline. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she was the only lifeline to his past, to everything he'd left, to a life he could never have again. Did he regret it? She squeezed his hand.

"Holding up?"

He reached up using his free hand to tuck an errant strand of hair behind her ear, an intimate gesture the original copy would have never dared.

"Truth be told, I'm terrified."

"Of what?"

He looked out across the water, pensive as always. She wondered if he could still see the cosmos; wondered if he still felt time passing like water.

"The possibilities. My mind is racing, and that's saying something. So long…"

He looked down again, and Rose saw that quiet desperation she was used to seeing in blue eyes rather than brown. Maybe he'd been right. Maybe this version of him was more like her first Doctor after all.

"For so long I wished I could be normal, but I never was. I ran from Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS. I was the black sheep of my entire race. I ran and ran, and I ended up on Earth. I was a different man then, only a few centuries old. I was so arrogant among the primitive Earthlings. But you lot, you changed me. I met Barbara and Ian, and I saw them live. I watched them love and fear, and they gave everything they had to one another. I couldn't help but wonder if they were primitive, or if my people were."

He seemed so far off, perhaps standing under that orange sky he dreamt about, or watching his first companions interact. She understood what it felt like to see an alien culture and have your ideals questioned. It was hard to imagine that he'd ever felt the same, ever been less than the man with the universe in his eyes. It was impossible to think of him as a wide eyed innocent in the vastness of it all. It made them equal, and yet so different still.

"The other Time Lords walked in eternity, but they never brushed hands with the worlds they were protecting. I jumped in—"

"Used the wrong verbs, got charged too much, ended up kissing total strangers?"

He laughed at her teasing, that not changed in the least.

"Exactly. I saw love start and end wars, watched as civilizations rose and fell, met all kinds of people. The High Council disapproved of my methods."

"You said that they resisted change."

He nodded, rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand, slightly distracting, but so him in that normal "can't seem to stay still" way.

"I never understood it. That's the nature of the universe. Look at the humans. You change, you adapt. You live until the end of the universe itself, ending up on a desolate planet, putting the hope of your entire civilization on a rocket destined for paradise. You live forever. The Time Lords aren't even a legend then. Not a whisper. It was humbling."

"You went the end of the universe?"

He nodded.

"Accidentally. I maintain it was Jack's fault."

She creased her eyebrows and gazed at him seriously. Their story was complex and twisted, but some of the holes were glaring and obvious. Jack was one of those.

"You're going to have to explain that properly eventually, you know."

He looked down at her and smiled. It was the "you brilliant little ape" smile that made her proud of herself.

"Oh, you know it. It's just tucked away inside your clever brain."

She snorted her amusement.

"Clever? Hardly."

He put his hands on her shoulders then, tilting his head down to look squarely into her eyes.

"Dimension cannon?"

"Three years of desperation. For the longest time, even the air in this universe felt wrong, tasted wrong to me. It was too sweet, too innocent, and too young. Like it wasn't done yet. It could feel like home, but it wasn't done. I figured that if I ever had the chance to get back to you, to home, I would be ready. I wouldn't be waiting like a damsel; I'd fight for my happy ending."

He nodded and cupped a hand around her cheek, thumb grazing her cheekbones.

"It wasn't much better on my end. I drove Martha away. She said she couldn't compete with a ghost. I suppose that was why she was so surprised to hear you, to meet you. I talked about you so often, she felt second best right from the start."

She sighed and raised her hand to cover his.

"Is it very rude of me to feel a little bit pleased at that? Not that she was hurt, but that you didn't forget me."

"You're asking me advice on being rude?"

"Rude and not ginger, I remember."

"But human. I'm human, Rose. It's… it's…"

She raised her eyebrows waiting for the verdict.

"Bad, good, scary, smelly? What?"

"Overwhelming. I wished for normal for so long, and now I have an abundance of it. A car, a house, carpets, a job."

She smiled, remembering that conversation on Krop Tor, and his abject fear of living on the slow path.

"No mortgage, though."

"No?"

His hopeful voice makes her smile.

"Pete gave me my own place last year, a little place with a lot of acreage. I took the doors out. They bothered me, too."

"Carpet?"

She laughed at the lost puppy look on his face.

"Hardwood. I can more than afford upkeep on it. Torchwood pays well for my experience."

"Ah."

She straightened her stature.

"You still don't trust Torchwood?"

"Those were very big guns you all were carrying. I think that the one Jack had was the same one from Satellite Five. And you lot with those energy blasters. Awful things, big guns."

She raised one eyebrow at his attitude. Had he forgotten himself in that self righteous tone?

"Those big guns of my lot's weren't from Torchwood. That was mostly Mickey's paranoia. And you can't exactly talk, you know. There was that gun in Utah, the one pointed at me. Trust me, I got a good look. It was large and gaudy. There was Jack's gun on Satellite Five, since you're so apt to recognize it. You held the Satellite hostage with it. You, and I mean you you, made that feedback gun to attack each of Davros' cells back on the Crucible. Save your guns lecture for someone else, Doctor."

He stood there for a moment with his hands on her hips, blinking. Slowly, a smile slid from the corners of his mouth into a full blown grin. He swept her up into a hug, crushing her to his blue suit.

"Rose Tyler, you are brilliant."

She smiled at his mood shift, and shook her head.

"I just called you a hypocrite."

"I know. Isn't that fantastic?"

She had to laugh when he spun her around.

"How is that fantastic?"

He stopped spinning, but he held her tight.

"You're always challenging me, calling me out when nobody else dares to. You're good for me, Rose Tyler, I don't care what body I've got. You're not afraid to throw my words and actions back at my face to knock me down a peg."

"You just think you're so impressive."

She didn't have time to think before he grabbed her face and fastened his mouth on hers, and it's everything and nothing all at once. She isn't sure if it's his Time Lord half, or if it's merely the way he kisses her, but she swears that, for an instant, she can feel the Earth spinning under their feet. When he threads his fingers into her hair, those long digits caressing her ears and neck, she forgets to care which it is. He pulls back, but only far enough to lean his forehead on hers and whisper to her under the sound of the wind.

"I love you, Rose Tyler. Of everything in the universe, you're the most precious to me. I didn't lose a heart, I gave it to you."

When she looks into those unfathomable brown eyes, she finally understands him, both of him. He'd always loved her. The old him never said it because it would hurt much too greatly once she was gone. But the him of now, he needed her to know it, to say the words. He was there just for her, as if he had been made for her alone. And just as much as she had always been his, was he hers. Mutual love acknowledged because the pull of eternity was gone, taking a million million possibilities away, but giving something sweeter, simpler.

He was giving her his forever, just as she'd once done.

"I love you, brown suit or blue."

He smiled, and they were kissing again, on a beach that held her worst memories and now possibly her best. The differences were there, and she'd just realized that they'd always been there. And he'd given them the opportunity to explore them, together.

A whole new universe was waiting for the Doctor and Rose Tyler. Different, but fantastic.

I couldn't help but to write about the end of "Journey's End". Us Rose/Doctor shippers felt both sad and ecstatic at the exact same time. It's him, but it's not. The implications, thinking of the Doctor living an every day life, boggles the mind. How does it all work out?

We'll never know, because RTD is leaving Doctor Who, and Steven Moffat is taking his place.

On the Doctor Who Confidential, Billie Piper described their final scene akin to the Beauty and the Beast final scene, when Belle kisses the Beast and he turns into the Prince. You rejoice that the Prince is free, but you mourn the loss of the Beast.

That Billie, she's a bit clever when she wants to be. :-D She even said that she had a hard time accepting that it was the end of Rose and the Doctor's story. Well Billie, so did we.

We salute you, and we'll miss you, if this is the end for your Doctor Who career. (Anyone thinking "spinoff"? I'm not sure about that, myself. But hey, Sarah-Jane got a spinoff, so why not?)

(And I in no way have anything against Elizabeth Sladen. She's my second favorite companion, followed closely by Ace.)