Familiar Face

The console room was quiet.

The rotor turned over slow and easy, and the roundels glowed their soft, patient glow, and the Doctor stood at the console with both hands flat on the edge of it, looking up at the ceiling.

It went up a very long way. It always had.

A smile found its way onto his face — not the enormous one, not the one that came out at the sight of a new sky. A smaller thing than that, and considerably heavier.

"I don't want to do this alone," he said.

He said it into the empty air, and the air, being the air of that particular ship, took it the way a good friend takes a confession: without fuss, and without pretending not to have heard. The lights along the gantry dipped. Just slightly. Just once.

He pushed off from the console and walked, and his stride was light — lighter than it had any business being — the metal gangway ringing under his feet the same six notes it always rang, in the same order.

The doors stood open at the end of it.

Beyond them there was no ground, no city, no small furious person demanding to know what he thought he was playing at. There was only space, and a nebula sprawled across the whole of it in crimson and violet and great slow rivers of gold.

He stopped in the doorway and set a hand against the frame. The wood was warm. It was always warm.

"I'm never alone with you," he said, and the smile broadened, and for a moment there was nothing sad in it at all.

Then the joy came up through him like weather.

He shoved the doors wide with both hands and leaned out into the starlight, out over a drop that meant precisely nothing to him, and shouted it at the nebula and the stars and anyone at all who happened to be listening:

"Joy to the world!"

And he laughed.

He stepped out onto the ledge of the police box — an ordinary painted step, made for milkmen and constables, presently sixteen thousand light-years from the nearest pavement — and the fire started in his hands.

A prickle first, then a warmth, then that old familiar heat unspooling out of his wrists and pooling into his palms, curling round his fingers like something molten deciding to be affectionate about it. Golden. It was always so golden.

He held his hands out in front of him and looked at them, blazing.

"And that is exactly the word," he said.

Then he looked back into the heart of his ship — one last time, and he knew it was the last time, and he let himself know it. His eyes were shining wet. His grin didn't waver by so much as a millimetre.

"This has been," he said, "an absolute joy."

Then he flung his arms wide to the cosmos, and let go.

The light went out of him in a torrent, tearing out of his chest and his throat and his outstretched hands, shredding away into the dark. The fire took his silhouette and swallowed it whole, and inside the blaze his face began to come apart — softening, smoothing, the old lines dissolving into brightness.

And then, as it always does, the fire went out.

The last of it curled away in bright drifting motes, and standing where he had stood was a woman with blonde hair blazing in the nebula-light, blinking hard, both hands half-raised, wearing an expression of pure astonishment.

He drew in a sharp breath. A grin broke over his face like sunrise over a hill.

"Oh, hello!" he gasped.

Then he was moving — back through the doors, back into the light of the console room, hands already up at his face. Jaw. Cheekbones. Mouth. The whole unfamiliar architecture of it, pressed and prodded and read like braille. Nose, present. Eyes, two of them, a good start. Hair — rather a lot of hair, and getting in the way.

He stopped.

Because it was familiar.

Not familiar the way an old face is familiar, not one of his own worn a second time round with the corners rubbed off. Something else. Something he knew the shape of without being able to say from where.

He stood very still in the middle of his ship, with both hands on a face that wasn't new at all, and waited for the name to arrive.

The TARDIS gave him the mirror.

It swung out of the wall on its little brass arm — the round shaving mirror that had followed her through six console rooms and had never once, in all that time, been asked for. She'd kept it. She'd been keeping it.

He looked.

And for a moment there was nothing, only a stranger looking back with his own startled expression on her face, and he thought: well, that's alright. New nose. Manageable hair. Could have been worse, could have had the ears again —

And then it landed.

It didn't arrive the way a name usually arrives, filed and fetched and handed over. It came the way a smell comes: all at once, sideways, dragging a whole decade in behind it. A council estate. A hand grabbing his in a basement full of shop dummies. Run. A beach in Norway with the wind taking every word that mattered.

"Rose," he said.

And it was her voice that said it.

She heard it happen — heard the shape of the name in her own mouth, in that flat, warm, unmistakable London vowel — and her hand came up over it as though she could push the word back in and start again.

She didn't laugh. Not straight away. When it came it was a wet, cracked, disbelieving sort of laugh, and she had to hold onto the console rail for it.

"Rose Tyler," she said, to the mirror, to the ship, to nobody. "You've given me Rose Tyler."

The rotor turned over slow and easy, and said nothing, and was not the least bit sorry.

Because that was the question, and it arrived about four seconds after the laughing stopped.

Not what. She could live with what. She'd been young and old and tall and short and Scottish and, on one occasion she preferred not to revisit, briefly convinced she was a lorry driver from Rotherham. The what had never mattered very much.

Why.

Regeneration doesn't invent a face. That was the thing. Down in all that howling cellular chaos there is no workshop, no committee, nobody sketching cheekbones — it doesn't build, it fetches. It reaches back into nine hundred years of accumulated looking-at-people and it comes up holding a face, and once or twice in a very long life it has come up holding a face that already belonged to somebody.

But those had been faces he'd seen. A man in Pompeii. A guard on Gallifrey. Strangers, in passing, filed and forgotten and then handed back with a message attached, if you were clever enough to read it.

Rose Tyler was not a stranger.

Rose Tyler was a living woman in a universe with a wall around it, sealed shut by his own hand, with a garden and a job and a man with one heart holding onto her — and you cannot take a face off somebody who is still using it.

So either something had gone catastrophically wrong.

Or something had gone extremely deliberately.

And that was worse, because regeneration does not make mistakes. It makes choices. It always has. It simply has never, in all the centuries she'd been arguing with it, bothered to explain a single one.

She leaned in close to the little brass mirror until her breath fogged it.

"Why you?" she said. "Out of everything. Out of everyone. Why you, and why now?"

The face in the mirror didn't know either.

That was the worst of it, really. It looked just as frightened as she was.

Then her head split open.

Not really — she checked, after, and the skull was intact — but that was what it felt like. A flat white slam, like walking full-tilt into a wall nobody had told her was there.

And she was somewhere else.

A corridor she had never walked. A door she had never opened. Her own hands doing something careful and terrible to a control panel, and she knew — the way you know things in the half-second before you're properly awake — that it hadn't happened yet.

He was doing it. She was doing it. The pronoun kept sliding off.

Dreams, then. That was all. Dreams were allowed to be strange, and she had earned a few.

There were people in the corridor. She didn't know a single face and she was already moving, already putting herself between them and something she couldn't see, the way you do for people you've spent years keeping alive.

More than one corridor. More than one somewhere. It went on longer than it should have.

Except she could smell the ozone.

She came back to herself on the floor.

Not gracefully. One knee down, one hand flat against the console housing, the other still gripping the brass mirror hard enough that the frame had left a line across her palm. The lights had gone that sullen amber they went when the ship was worried about her and didn't want to say so.

"I'm fine," she told it.

The hum didn't change.

"I said I'm fine."

She got up. That was the thing about the getting up — she didn't remember choosing to, particularly. Some part of her that was older than this face and this voice and this ridiculous new height had simply decided the sitting-down portion of the evening was over, and the rest of her came along.

She smoothed her coat. Checked the mirror — cracked, of course, hairline, corner to corner — and set it face-down on the console, which felt like cowardice and also like the only sensible thing she'd done all night.

Somewhere under the floor, something began to chime.

"Right," she said, to nobody, in a voice she was still learning. "Later, then."