Rose stood before his door. She knew it was his bedroom door, it was the only wooden one she’d seen on the TARDIS, decorated in swirly circles and a door handle. Oh, she knew it was his, that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was her choice. Lip caught between her teeth, one hand playing with an earring-less ear, she shifted from right to left foot. Choices. Paths. Forks in the road. Stay or go.

Adam was snoring halls and halls away. His shock at the TARDIS and not being the smartest bloke on the block, and maybe a few snarky comments about his brains courtesy of the Doctor’s spectacularly cursing wit had reduced him to a gapped-mouth mute. She didn’t care.

What she cared about was today and the Doctor’s reactions. (I'm the only one left. I win. How about that?) About the Doctor himself. (Feels like there's no one. And his voice had broken and her heart along with his words. Well then, good thing I'm not going anywhere. She’d wanted to take his hand, to hug him close, but by then Adam had somehow thought running up to them was a good idea.)

Rose shifted again, leg muscles slightly sore from running up too many flights of stairs to count. (Except she knew exactly how many, didn’t she. Just as she knew the exact number of dead in the now concreted-over underground bunker.) But this wasn’t about her and the nightmares she knew she’d have once she eventually closed her eyes. Rose didn’t really want to close her eyes.

This was about the Doctor. This was about her choice.

She had two choices. Follow the path back to her own bedroom, currently just a few doors down the hallway. Blaze a new trail, make her own path.

Knock and ask how he was, get him to talk about the last Dalek and his people and what happened. He’d only recently begun to open up—a comment here, a line there, a half-told story he was unable to finish. Deep inside her, Rose knew he needed that. Needed to talk and remember and grieve.

Or she could turn on her slippered heel and leave. Let him have his solitary grief and memories of long-gone people and places and mourn as he would.

She raised her hand to knock.

Let it drop. A choice. Two paths. A fork in the road. And there it was, stretched out before her. The Doctor told her he could see timelines, could feel which was the better one… no not better, which was the right one? How had he put it? Which was the one supposed to happen? Only it was more than that, with nuances Rose couldn’t and might never understand.

“I might not be able to see time,” she mumbled as much to talk herself into this action as it was to talk herself out of. “Not with the forks and choices and paths you can,” she told the door as if it were the Doctor himself. “But I know people. Even 900 year old Time Lords.”

One path led back to her bedroom.

The other led to his.

Rose sighed and turned on her heel, courage deserting her. It wasn’t that she wasn’t brave enough to confront the Doctor; it was that she respected him and his privacy too much. Didn’t want to intrude. Didn’t want to push herself onto him. His private grief, the magnitude of which she couldn’t begin to comprehend.

(One day it's all gone. Even the sky. My planet's gone. It's dead. It burned like the Earth. It's just rocks and dust before it's time. There was a war and we lost. I'm a Time Lord. I'm the last of the Time Lords. They're all gone. I'm the only survivor.)

Two steps, three, and something inside her broke. Before she knew what had happened, she had not only returned to his door, but she’d very clearly and very loudly knocked, and before she could comprehend how any of that happened, or make a hasty retreat, the door opened.

Her choice was clear. “Doctor,” she whispered and looked from his jumper-covered chest to his blue eyes, burning bright in the dimness of the doorway.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Typical. Asking after her. Part to deflect, she thought now, standing there before him on the cusp.

“Are you all right?” he asked immediately, gruff tones harsher than normal but they flowed over her like a gentle caress.

“I’m fine, Doctor,” she assured him. She could still leave. Let him have this deflection and tell him she had nightmares. Rose stepped closer, not sure how her legs moved. “Are you?”

Another step closer.

He said nothing, but the hooded look in his sharp blue eyes, the tense-taut-unyielding posture, his fingers clenched into tight, tight fists told her more than words ever could.

She stepped over the edge. And into his arms.

Rose reached out. And it all snapped into place. She reached out and took his hand, twining their fingers inexorably together though he didn’t look at her. “Tell me what happened.”

“Rose.” A strangled prayer, a breath of need.

Rose held him through the night. As the nightmares came, she held him close and ignored her own need for sleep. Her own flashes of nightmarish guilt that lay heavily around her heart and burrowed into her soul. She wrapped her body around his and though she didn’t say the words, she wrapped him in her love; promised she’d never leave him.

Would never let go. Would be there for him.

“I promise, Doctor. I’m never leaving you.”

In the darkness of his bedroom, in the darkness of his nightmares, he heard her. And held her closer.

The next morning, before Adam rose and (refused breakfast on the grounds of nerves, the tosser) Rose looked at the Doctor and grinned, hand in his. Exhaustion tugged her limbs and shadowed his gaze. But he answered her grin with one of his own soft ones, so rarely seen.

Her heart did a slow flip in her chest at that look and Rose filed it away.

“I think you need a reminder,” she said. “Gallifrey was home and though everyone leaves home eventually, no one should forget it. What did it look like?”

And that was how their kitchen (It’s a galley, Rose, we’re in a ship) was created.

Their kitchen. Theirs. With its curtains fluttering in the wind and grey clouds dancing over the orange sky with a hint of a hot, dry earthy-scented breeze. In the distance, the snowcapped Mount Cadon (A hermit used to sit up there, Rose, and told the most amazing stories) stood tall above the Cadonflood River of Southern Gallifrey.