Searching for the Doctor [attn: Rose]

Rose stopped a few steps above her, a sort of amazed smile. "I'm not." She was starting to think running into this woman might've been an enormous streak of luck.

"Not exactly a computer wiz myself, but I can run a mean search engine. Hopefully that's all we'll need." She reassured her. "Library'd have other people about if we needed a hand but... Explanations'd be a bit awkward. Whichever you think'd work better." Rose leaned against the handrail slightly.

After all, she had to admit she wasn't sure how much she'd trust herself at the moment. Rose had a good feeling about this though, now that she realized. More than just the the residual from her getting there.

"Library'd have other people about if we needed a hand but... Explanations'd be a bit awkward. Whichever you think'd work better."

Donna smiled. "Oh, I like you," she breathed. "You're sneaky like me. That's your way of saying you'd rather not go to the library, yeah? Come to think of it, I don't think you're wrong. Explanations would be a bit awkward, at least and what little I do know of my friend..." she paused looking away from the girl as she felt her memories floating back to the TARDIS.

She thought of its green-gold light and the endless number of gadgets on board; the look on the Doctor's face when she'd appeared inside. Everything about that day had been nothing short of amazing, if she was willing to ignore the fact that she'd been tricked by Lance and then had watched him die. Only part of her was sorry to have beared witness.

But, the things she'd seen that day...the Earth being created; being amongst the stars...

There was no way to explain that to a person without being thrown into the loony bin, except...

Donna almost wanted to tell Rose. She almost wanted to share her experience, because something deep in her gut told her that maybe Rose would know how to find him again. Why she felt that way or how she thought Rose would know was beyond her comprehension and it didn't matter.

It occurred to Donna that she hadn't finished her sentence. "...well, I'd rather not ask for help; people get nosy," she finally said, looking back at Rose again. "Right," she decided. "My place, then. Need a lift or do you want to just follow?"

"Yeah. Don't want to deal with people looking over our shoulders." She made a face at the idea of the situation in general, along with the bonus additions of what was actually going to be looked up being spied at. On the one hand it'd most likely just get some odd looks, on the other possibly some advice. The third hand, which had the lowest probability but highest likelihood of happening was that it'd end up getting them trouble. Funny how often that combination turned up.

Rose could only hope that the internet held some more luck this time then it had her last. She was searching for something more vague though, so she'd keep her fingers crossed for luck. It had worked once that day, so she figured it was worth a try.

"A lift'd be great." Rose told her with a thankful smile, noticing the pause but not saying anything about it. "I... didn't quite think things through." She admitted with some embarrassment. The only thing she really had to blame was the doubt that had lingered on the idea of whether it would work or not. Finding her way back was something of a talent, one she hoped would keep its presence.

The drive home was probably one of the most quiet and long drives Donna had ever made. There was a comfortable silence between the two women as Donna tried to work out whether anyone would be home and Rose mulled over God knows what.

It seemed as though the two of them had such a similar agenda that it might actually be the --

The thought broke itself off and Donna lost her focus for a moment, having to drop both feet down on the brakes so as not to blow through a red traffic light.

Suddenly, with great force, realization hit her like a ton of bricks. The whiplash from the quick stop went unnoticed to Donna as some select memories from that day flashed back at her.



"How many women have you abducted?!"

"...that's my friend's."

"Where is she, then? Gone out for a space walk?!"

"She's gone."

"Gone WHERE?!"

"I lost her..."

--
"Thanks, then, Donna. Good luck. And just...be magnificent."

"I think I will, yeah... Doctor?"

"What? What is it now?"

"That friend of yours...what was her name?"

"Her name was Rose."



Donna's breathing went slightly shallow as she turned her head slowly to look at her passenger and she swallowed hard. "Oh, my God..." she whispered.

Rose had been letting her mind more or less wander as she watched the world pass outside through the window. She half expected to look up and see the now-familiar zeppelins but the sky stayed clear.

When the car stopped suddenly she put her hands in front of her out of instinct. A quick glance showed her the red light, and feeling Donna's eyes on her she turned to her right.

"Donna, you alright?" Worry crossed her expression at the whisper and the look, and she reached out to put her hand on the woman's arm. "Is something wrong?"

Realizing that the gaze had been on her she changed her line of questioning slightly. "Something I did? Or..."

Donna couldn't decide if she wanted to laugh or cry. Her mind being torn between the two, she let out a huff of laughter as a solitary tear rolled down her right cheek. "You're her..." she breathed, looking back at Rose. "You're her. You're Rose. His Rose. You must be..."

The look of sadness on the Doctor's face in Donna's memory mirrored perfectly the look of sadness on Rose's when they'd still been inside Torchwood.

Rose was looking for a friend who traveled a lot. She was planning to look for her friend by looking for weird things, rather than looking up a name or a face.

The light turned green and Donna ignored the blaring horn of the car behind her; didn't even take notice when the driver went around her, flipping her his middle finger as he did so.

She just stared at the young woman in her passenger seat with her jaw slightly slack and let out another short, quiet huff of air before going on. "You're the Doctor's Rose..."

There was a moment when she was going to press in, mention she'd introduced herself, but she'd been interrupted by the mention of the Doctor.

Rose froze in her seat, eyes wide and mouth hanging open slightly. Her own breath caught for a moment as she whirled through her own head, the words echoing. She was aware of Donna sitting there, but not quite the rest of the world.

He was the friend Donna was looking for too then, and that clicked into place. Made more sense then anything. The saving and offer to travel... The one thing she didn't understand was when she'd managed to come up. Her urge to find him multiplied, if that was even possible.

"Yeah..." Rose finally managed, voice somewhat shocked as she rediscovered it. She shook it off slightly, eyes staying widened. "That's... That's who you're looking for too, isn't it? The Doctor." The smile came along with the words almost automatically.

"Talk about odds..." She muttered lightly. A thought crossed her mind, and she asked it almost without thinking. "How was he?"

"Yeah..."

Donna let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding...and smiled.

They were looking for the same person. Donna felt simultaneously relieved, excited, and starstruck. This was The Rose. Somehow, Donna thought maybe she knew it from the moment she'd seen her. Somewhere deep in her gut, she'd always known it was Rose. Everything was too perfect and similar for her not to be.


"How was he?"

Her smile fell away slowly as she looked back at Rose. She found that, as much as she wanted to give her newfound friend some reassurance, it would be a lie.

"Not well," she said finally, softly, after a long pause. "He misses you so much, Rose. Why did you leave? You said yourself that you didn't want to leave - back at Torchwood, you did... So, why did you?"

She paused. "God...the look on his face when I found..." her voice trailed off and she frowned. "Why did you go? He scared me and I didn't know any better, but you were his friend...why would anyone who knew him leave him behind?"

Her face fell at that news, eyes lowering as the comments continued until she was staring at her hands in her lap. Rose's thoughts slipped back to the last time she'd seen him, those two minutes on the beach. She was silent for a few long moments before she looked up, not quite meeting Donna's eyes.

"I wouldn't have left him, ever. I didn't have a choice..." Her voice was quiet, almost wavering. "It was... 'S hard to explain. It was in that room, what happened... Short story's that I fell." That was the simplest way to put it really. Rose took a breath, trying to figure out how to word it.

"There was a hole in the universe, between two of them.. We were closing it, it was a sort of...self-fixing thing. Closed the hole and pulled the Cybermen and Daleks into the Void. That's... the space between the universes it's sort of..." She let the explanation trail off.

"That's what the levers were for. they kept it open. The hole. That way it'd draw in everything that'd come through there, and close in on itself. He was by one of them and I had the other. The one by me didn't stay locked, and I went to pull it back. I had to. I did." Her gaze faltered slightly. "But I couldn't hold onto it, and I slipped. I got caught at the last minute, right before I'd have fallen into the thing, but...got jumped to the other universe. Right before the hole closed up. So there wasn't a way back."

"Saw him just one more time after that... He..."

Donna felt her heart breaking for Rose as she told her story. The sadness in the Doctor's eyes made so much more sense now. The word use he'd chosen - "I lost her..." - it all made so much more sense hearing the story.

"Oh..." Donna breathed. Although, as sad as she felt for Rose, if Rose had never left, would Donna have met the Doctor? Was it more than the particles that had drawn Donna into the TARDIS? Fate, perhaps, that she'd disrupted by declining his offer? By not going with him, had she inadvertently changed something in time?

Rose went on telling the rest of her story and Donna felt her heart break all over again. She hadn't a choice but to go. From the sounds of it, it was jump to another universe or cease to exist all together. Donna would've done the same.

"Saw him just one more time after that... He..."

"He what?" she asked reflexively. Immediately, Donna shook her head. She didn't want to pry. "None of my business; sorry."

Another thing she wanted to ask but wasn't sure she should was, if there wasn't a way back, as Rose had said, then how had she turned up in Torchwood that very evening and did it have some deeper meaning that she'd come across Donna, of all people, rather than show up in an empty building which must have been the purpose of going there?

"No, it's... He told me this was impossible. The coming back." She didn't mention the part about two universes collapsing, they hadn't, after all. "That I'd never see him again."

Rose smiled slightly, once more with that tinge of confidence. "But here I am. Hard part done, yeah?" She hoped. It had to be just a matter of time and place now. The part of her that argued he had no reason to get drug back to 21st century London, but Donna proved to remind her that he apparently did.

She'd find him, they'd find him. "It can't be chance that you were in the room when I made it over. 'Specially not now."

If she'd gained one thing with him, it was the determination not to give up. That had been ages ago, but it still stood. A hand came up and brushed hair behind her ear once more.

Donna finally put her eyes back on the road and lifted her feet off the brake pedal, making a right when the light turned green again.

"I don't think it was chance, either. Not at all," she said. "And you know what? There's got to be something we can do to bring him back..."

There was a bigger picture here, but Donna still failed to see it. First, Donna had decided it was time to look for the Doctor again. Then, she'd been drawn to Torchwood when she knew nothing about it, really, and there, she'd met Rose. The Doctor's Rose.

It was only a matter of time, she thought, before the two of them properly managed to put their heads together and piece together the puzzle. She smiled. "We've got work to do."

Almost instantly, though, the smile melted away again. What if the Doctor had followed Donna's advice? What if he'd found someone new - someone to stop him - and he wouldn't want to come back for Rose or he'd forgotten about Donna?

"Not sure what we could do exactly... It's always just sort of chance, ending up places." Rose went over the ways she could think of that they'd been drawn places.

Mauve things hurtling through the Vortex, overpowered transmat, distress beacons, message on the psychic paper... None of those were things she could figure out how to rig up. It took alot to get noticed on purpose from the looks of it.

"Definitely." Rose agreed with her, pulled from her reverie, gaze back on the window. "The question is, what?" She wished that he'd carried on carrying that phone from when it'd been the three of them.

"Everything I can think of that's worked is sort of beyond what we can do."

Once again, the women fell into a comfortable silence. Donna was trying to think. She assumed Rose was doing the same.

She made the drive almost automatically, her mind elsewhere. Maybe if they couldn't bring the Doctor to them, perhaps they could bring themselves to the Doctor.

"You want to know something, Rose? How I met the Doctor?" she asked looking briefly over at her passenger before flickering her eyes back to the road. "I got pulled into the TARDIS. I was walking down the bloody aisle, about to get married...and all of a sudden, next thing, I was in the TARDIS." She grinned. "There's got to be a way I could do it again...we could do it."

Rose looked at her with slight amazement. "Seriously?" She tried to imagine that, failing somewhat and instead picturing the reaction. "Bet he was far from thrilled about that." The reaction was pretty much universal for things relating to the TARDIS.

"Could work, maybe. D'you ever get an explanation 'bout how you did it?" Somehow she doubted it had anything to do with the actual wedding part.

"More likely to be able to do it again then how I met him, I'd guess. I got attacked by shop dummies in the basement of my job, and he showed up out of nowhere and told me to run."

Donna gave Rose a wry grin as she turned onto her street. "Actually, I think I was a lot less thrilled than he was. I thought he'd kidnapped me," she laughed. "Sounds stupid, now, but at the time it was the only thing I could come up with for having been walking down the aisle one second and standing in a strange room with a strange man the next..."

She paused. "Something like...human particles in liquid form? I'd ingested them...that's a long story I don't much want to rehash, if you don't mind - nothing personal - but they were drawn into the TARDIS, like magnets, or something."

"More likely to be able to do it again then how I met him, I'd guess. I got attacked by shop dummies in the basement of my job, and he showed up out of nowhere and told me to run."

Unable to stop it, Donna let out a laugh. "Oh, I'm sorry, I know it isn't funny," she said quickly, "but...it is a little bit, yeah?"

Rose smiled slightly herself. "I thought it was a prank. College kids, I'd decided. He.. wasn't very impressed." It wasn't like she'd known any better. She still thought she had a point though.

"Wasn't very funny then, but putting it like that... It just sounds silly." All of it. Wasn't a wonder really that it had been covered up as... what had it been, terrorists? She found herself wondering how the general public reacted to mannequins after that.

"Human particles?" Rose racked her brain to try to think if she'd heard of them. The void...stuff was the only thing she could think of. "Wonder how you'd get them... let alone liquify them. Don't think I've ever come across them."