She doesn't want to meet her own eyes, but it's a better place to focus than on the blood that's slowly beginning to encrust around her lips.

She has no idea if this sight is real or imagined. She's long since lost track of the difference.

Blood. If it's really there at all, she wonders how it got there. She feels dizzy with confusion.

"Rose."

The world revolves too quickly around her and her vision swims, but that voice is crystal clear to her nonetheless.

She can feel him approaching, inching up behind her. The sound of his footsteps is too loud and out of place. Wrong. It's wrong. It's impossible for him to be there. She's somehow certain of that, though she can't recall the why of it. She doesn't think it's just because she swears she remembers biting, tearing, blood, and the sight of him left sprawled on the ground with his face marred by a look of incomprehension mixed with betrayal.

How long ago had that been? Had it even actually happened at all?

"It's all right. Just calm down," he instructs.

In the mirror, over her shoulder, she can see a blood-streaked hand extending entreatingly towards her. Blood, blood and more blood. Her whole mind feels dark red and sticky like a sea of it. She can taste the tang of it. She wonders if that's his blood in and around her mouth. Lunging at him and sinking her teeth in had felt so real, too real, but everything does lately, even when she's almost completely sure that it's all in her head.

How can she ever know what's real? That lack of certainty is intensely frightening, and there's nothing she can do to stamp that feeling down. It's overwhelming.

She grips the edge of the sink in front of her and lets loose a pained wail, the fight nearly going out of her. She still has just enough left in her to initially thrash wildly against him when his hands, one still slick with blood, close around her upper arms.

In her mind's eye, she can see herself attacking his throat, ripping into him, but there's a ring of falsity about that memory. It doesn't make sense. His hand, she thinks suddenly. That's where the blood is, so she might nearly be able to believe in that version of events as it flits across her memory. It's his hand, not his throat, that she'd bitten when he'd held it out in an attempt to grasp her own, just the way she can almost recall him having done so many times before. And yet he held that same hand out towards her again just now, even though she's hurt him before, even knowing that she might well attack him again. She knows suddenly, unquestioningly (which makes a nice change for her) that she loves him for that, and for so many other reasons.

So why had she hurt him, if she felt that way? She isn't sure. She can't even wrap her mind around his presence in this tiny bathroom, or figure out what she's doing here either, so how can she really be sure of anything?

"God, I don't know!" she exclaims. The air itself seems to visibly reverberate with the powerful sound, but she has some vague concept that she shouldn't be able to see that. It's yet another thing that she can't accept as real despite the way it feels. Yet another reminder that she can't trust anything, not even her own senses.

She falls to the floor, slipping through his grasp, and rocks herself mindlessly with her eyes clenched shut and her hands over her ears, trying to block out everything and somehow manage to centre herself.

"Oh, Rose," he says bleakly. She can't block that out, somehow, and isn't entirely sure that she really wants to. "What have you done to yourself?"

It's a slow process, surfacing from her madness. It always is and it's only getting worse. She finds herself understanding the full meaning of his question, which is a good sign that she's coming out of it.

For now.

In a moment of dawning clarity, she breathes, "Doctor, I'm sorry."

She allows it when he drops to his knees beside her and folds her protectively into his arms. She shouldn't let him. These spells of awareness are becoming so brief that they might as well be nonexistent. She doesn't know when she'll get confused again, and neither does he. It's stupid for him to make himself this vulnerable to her; that moment where she loses it again is bound to come soon enough, and this time she might make a target of his throat after all if she catches him in this position. They should separate so that she doesn't have the chance to hurt him again.

Neither of them pulls away, though. These moments are too brief, and they can't be sure when the next one will come. They have to take advantage of them while they can.

She hates that she's done this to herself. Even more, she hates that she's done it to him. While it's true that no one had warned her that such prolonged and extensive use of the Dimension Cannon could affect her like this, with the strain slowly but surely tearing her mind into shreds that she's now having ever greater difficulty holding together, it's also a fact that she'd known that there were serious risks and she'd accepted those risks on her own behalf. He shouldn't have to suffer for her decision.

She'd told him so once before, in another lucid time. She'd demanded that he leave her be and go live a proper life (he's only got just the one now, after all) instead of wasting it caring for her, especially when she's really not her at all most of the time. He'd laughed softly and told her he had nowhere he'd rather be. She wonders how long it will be until her memory of that moment, and the accompanying look of devotion in his eyes, is lost completely along with so many others.

Even in her best moments, like now, she remembers and understands less and less each time.

She clings to him, wishing it could last. She apologises again to him, trying to cover so many things within those two simple words. He kisses her forehead and tells her there's nothing to be sorry for. It's his own fault for startling her, he says. He's always been a bit too noisy in this incarnation, he jokes weakly.

"I'll find a way to fix this," murmurs the Doctor soothingly. "You know me. Bit of a genius, really. I can do anything. Just hold on for me for a little while longer."

She doesn't believe him, but it's still somehow better to pretend otherwise and to try as hard as she can to do as he asks, for whatever good that it might do her.

She closes her eyes against the light that seems suddenly too bright and wonders why she's shaking. Something's holding her, trapping her, she realises. She pushes away violently, disoriented. She scuttles backwards across the tile floor.

Her eyes over-wide, she looks at the man in front of her and sees nothing more than a stranger who'd been holding her down against her will just a moment ago. He's dangerous. She can feel it. Her whole body tenses. She pulls herself into a crouch as if she might spring at him at any moment, but she makes the decision at the last second to throw herself in the other direction. Flight instead of fight, unless he presses his luck.

She runs. Some small part of her knows that he'll follow, and is strangely glad for it. The much larger part of her only knows that he's a threat, and possibly also an obstacle to the freedom that she so badly wants to taste just now. She just wants to be out of this confinement, free to see the stars outside and feel like a part of them. And even though she fears him, it feels oddly familiar — somehow right, even — that the man should be there running as well. Just as long as he doesn't try to get too close to her, of course.

And so the cycle begins again, though Rose doesn't know it.

~FIN~