Traveling by dimension cannon left a metallic tang in Rose’s mouth, like she’d been sucking on a sixpence. It stung her skin like sunburn after the beach, too, sensitive even to the air. After each of the first few trips, Rose had stripped off her jacket and shirt, looking for bruises and burns. She found nothing, pain without physical injury, as unpredictable as everything else about the dimension cannon.

Since the dimension cannon had begun to work properly, Rose had seen two dozen different versions of the Doctor, living in every universe the imagination could conjure. With curly chestnut hair and a velvet frock coat; gangly and bow-tied, bangs flopping into his eyes; in a crimson jumper and leather, ears utterly ridiculous and utterly perfect; with a panama hat and absurd vest knit with question marks. She’d even seen him pinstriped and well-coiffed, brandishing his silver sonic.

But she shied away and avoided contact with any of them. Something whispered to her that none of them was her Doctor; surely that something was the remnant of the TARDIS and Bad Wolf, nestled in her inmost being. Seeing those parallel Doctors was like putting a key in the wrong lock and hearing it rattle but never feeling it click open. She couldn’t force it, no matter how much she might want to.

Every bit of that instinct also told her this starless, stolen Earth was right. This Doctor was right, even just the glimpse of him she’d seen on the computer monitor at the Nobles’ house. In this universe, the key slid home and every one of the lock pins finally, finally fit exactly as they should. The key twisted. The door was open.

If there wasn’t so much work to do, so many people to save, Rose would’ve wept in relief.

The moment she materialized on that dark, empty street, she went through the landing routine, her brain too preoccupied with pain for anything else: brace knees to prevent buckling, place finger on trigger, blink four times to clear vision, assess threats. Everything was quiet and abandoned, the pavement littered with the detritus of a forced evacuation. No Daleks in sight.

Rose squinted at the church on the far end of the street. Heat blossomed in her chest, spreading through her veins like living, golden fire. Donna Noble and the TARDIS were there. And he was there, facing away from her. Tall, impossibly skinny frame built for whipcord strength; head topped by glorious, unruly hair; and the set of his frame, the familiar hunch of his shoulders as he worked out the solution to an impossible problem.

Yes. It’s him, thegolden fire breathed in her every cell. My Doctor.

Rose could hardly think; she took a step forward, in awe and disbelief. Donna nodded in Rose’s direction and the Doctor turned. The expression on his face was hopeful disbelief and wild joy, all at the same time. Rose wanted to scream and laugh and sob. She managed to beam at him instead.

The golden fire surged through her, sultry and electric. She was running, heedless of the gun bruising her hip. He was running, too, the distance between them closing with every stride of his long legs.

After hundreds of trips through the dimension cannon, hundreds of Earths, so many Doctors who were a facsimile of her one, true Doctor – here he was, bolting to her with pure, unadulterated adoration on his face. He was coming to wrap her in his arms, to fall to his knees with her, his breath cool as he murmured her name and pressed kisses over her face. He would whisper against her skin what he surely had meant to say on Bad Wolf Bay.

Rose Tyler, I love you.

She was going to be with her Doctor, traveling in the TARDIS. Everything as it should be.

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