Disclaimer: Doctor Who isn't mine.

The thing he won't mention – doesn't dare mention, not even now, after all this time – is that he's been in love before.

She was all pink and yellow and purple shirts flung over the silver banisters of the TARDIS. She was a young thing, a pretty blonde one, and she smiled with her tongue peeking out between her teeth (he would dream of that tongue in the years to come – more than 200 years later and, still, he could never, ever forget that tongue).

And then Donna: wonderful, brilliant Donna with her flaming red hair and her questions – he was forced to say her name (the last time, he swore). If he's being honest, it was a relief to get it out of his system.

Martha, with her unrequited infatuation, wrung out the name once more. That time, it had been a reassurance, a warning: the Doctor had loved that woman (defender of the Earth, she was, and yet he wanted her to stay everywhere with him), and he could not, would not, love Martha back.

So Donna returned to the Doctor (or had the Doctor returned to Donna?) and, once again, she pressed him for answers until, eventually, Donna met her in a dream. That's all the Doctor allowed himself, the knowledge that it was a dream and nothing more. She couldn't return to him, not ever.

Until, of course, she did.

And then he left her. Or she loved him. Or he stayed, he's not sure how to describe it. Even now, it confuses him. (The last time, he'd think of her for certain, he swore.)

Amelia Pond, the girl who waited, his glorious Pond, she never asked, not once.

But she knew, of course she knew.

Because the TARDIS had just one spare room (an oath to himself that the Doctor wouldn't take too many lives into his own hands at the same time), and just one chest of drawers in that room, and just one shirt remained, folded carefully into a rectangle at the very, very back of the bottom drawer. And she had unfolded the shirt, shaken it out to hold it up in front of her torso and see how it would look on her (not good). And then a picture, a tiny polaroid fluttered out – the girl with short, yellow hair, light pink skin, and a hand rested upon the Doctor's chest.

On the back of the photograph, scrawled out quickly, was a name – Rose Tyler.