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Author's Note: Thanks to astrogirl2 for reminding me of the name of the Eye of Orion, and to doyle_sb4 for the beta-reading/Brit-picking.

Five Planets Rose Tyler Never Visited
by Mireille

They were here, the Doctor had said, because it was a nice place to spend an afternoon, calm and peaceful and relaxing. Never mind that those were three words Rose wouldn't ever have used to describe the Doctor, not in a million years. Not the bloke who'd talked her into traveling around in a time-machine (not that she'd taken all that much convincing) and then decided that the end of the world was a good first destination. She liked him, most of the time, but he wasn't relaxing.

Except that he was doing a pretty good impression of it at the moment, lying on his back in the impossibly green grass--the sort of grass that only existed in adverts for lawn fertilizer--and looking up at the clouds, which were the sort of fluffy white that Rose best remembered from gluing bits of cotton wool onto paper in nursery school. "The Eye of Orion," he said when he noticed she'd come out of the TARDIS. "Feel that? It's one of the most peaceful spots in the universe."

"What happens here?"

"Happens? What do you mean, happens?"

"I mean the last place you took me, the world blew up. And when I met you, plastic shop dummies were going to take over the world. What happens here?"

"It's the Eye of Orion. Peace and quiet and fresh air, that's what happens here, as a general rule."

"And that's why we're here?"

"That's why we're here." He took a deep breath, grinning. "Just smell that air. You won't get air like that anywhere on Earth, not for the past thousand years or more."

"It doesn't even look very alien," she said.

"You're complaining?" He sat up, scrambling to his feet. "I take you to one of the most beautiful spots in the universe, and you're complaining?"

She shrugged. It was beautiful. It was peaceful, and pleasant, and the air was clean and fresh. It was also completely boring.

"Humans," he muttered. "You're all the same. None of you can appreciate a good thing when it's right under your noses."

"Yes, I can," she insists. "I came with you, didn't I? I'm out here in a time machine with an alien, instead of back home with my mum and Mickey. Don't tell me I don't appreciate the chance to see things nobody on earth ever dreamed of. And if I'm going to go somewhere millions of miles away from London--millions of years away--then I don't want to just sit around and watch the grass grow! Maybe later I'll want a holiday someplace quiet, but right now, I want to see the world. The universe," she corrected herself, quickly.

She braced herself for another comment about the stupidity of humans, but it didn't come. Instead, he just looked at her, his head tilted to one side, like he was studying some strange alien species--which, in a way, she supposed he was. "You're serious," he said at last.

"Yeah, I'm serious."

"You're not going to start moaning and groaning and tell me you want to go home and have a proper cup of tea?"

"That depends on how annoying you're planning on being," she said, grinning.

"You actually want to be here."

"Why is that so hard to believe?"

He shook his head. "It just doesn't happen that often."

Stupid, really, to think she'd been the first. He could be thousands of years old, after all; who knew how long he'd been traveling around, how many people he'd had traveling around with him. Stupid to care, too, that she wasn't the first person he'd offered to take with him.

"Well, it's happening now," she said, grinning at him. "You promised to show me the universe, and I'm holding you to it."

He didn't say anything, at first, just grinned at her. "I know just the place, then," he said, grabbing her hand. "You'll love it."

He started toward the TARDIS, pulling her along with him, and Rose grinned as well, running to keep up.

"We didn't talk to a single person the whole time we were on that planet," Rose said once the TARDIS had dematerialized.

"No."

He didn't even notice that she'd remembered to call the aliens "people" and not "aliens." They were humanoid, which helped, but still, she was working hard on adjusting to space and time travel, and she thought she deserved a little credit. "And we didn't do anything, either. Just walked around. You wouldn't even let me go off on my own." He kept assuring her she was perfectly safe, but he hadn't wanted to let her explore, either. And he hadn't wanted to explore, which was completely unlike him.

"No, we didn't."

"Two hours of nothing," she said. "At least, I think it was two hours. I'm never sure if I can trust my watch any more."

"It was," he confirmed, and Rose wanted to thump him.

"So why were we there?"

"To look around."

"At what? I just saw people in robes going about their business. That's not really worth watching, is it?"

"Can be," he said, flipping switches and turning dials on the console without looking at her.

"Does that planet even have a name? You never said."

"It does."

Right, she was definitely going to thump him soon. Or scream. Or something. "What's its name, then?"

"Gallifrey."

Oh, thank you, Doctor. Very helpful. If she had an outer-space version of Google handy, maybe she'd be able to find out where that actually was, but it was just nonsense syllables to her, and he wasn't telling her anything. "What's so special about it?"

"Who says there is?"

"Two hours spent wandering around and trying to stay out of sight. What's going on, Doctor?"

He might have just turned away from her to look at another set of readouts on the console, or maybe he was avoiding her eyes. She couldn't tell, and when he was frustrating like this, she started wondering if she could make any guesses about what he was thinking. Maybe she was completely wrong about everything. Maybe he was just too alien for her to understand at all.

"I wanted you to see it when it was still there," he said, quietly. A lot more quietly than she was used to from him, and Rose came around the console so that she could see his face.

He wasn't giving a lot away, really, just looking down at one of the dials thoughtfully. But if she wasn't wrong about everything and he wasn't too alien for her to ever understand, then she'd have said he looked sad. Wistful, maybe.

And that was when she realized where they'd just been, and why they'd stayed on the edges of things, trying to avoid notice. "Oh," she said, feeling like she'd just been the biggest prat in the universe.

"Yeah," he said, turning another dial.

"Thanks," she added quietly.

He didn't reply, didn't even nod in acknowledgement, for a little bit. Then he looked up at her, grinning again, although if she had to guess, she'd say it looked a little forced. "So where do you want to go next?"

"Is the planet going to blow up?"

"Would I be sitting on a beach with you if the planet were about to blow up?"

"No," she admitted. "At least, I hope not."

"Absolutely not. We'd be watching from a safe distance. If it was a natural sort of blowing up, I mean."

"Is there going to be a war?"

"Nobody lives here. Hard to have a war without anyone to fight it."

"An invasion?"

"Not for another, oh, six or seven thousand years," he said, still far too calmly for someone talking about alien invasions. Of course, Rose wasn't sure what was too calm for someone sitting on a beach made of light blue sand, eating sandwiches from an old-fashioned picnic basket--"sandwiches" was the only identification he'd given her, that and "perfectly safe for humans," so Rose had decided she wasn't hungry--and looking out at a deep cobalt sea. Maybe this was exactly the right amount of calm.

"So why are we--" She broke off. It was suddenly a bit darker, and as Rose looked up at the pale pink sky, she saw two suns sinking, more rapidly than she was used to, toward the horizon, turning the sky into watercolor swirls of pinks and purples and gold. She watched, silently, for the few minutes it took for the suns to disappear completely.

"That was gorgeous," she said, finally, realizing that the Doctor was looking at her and grinning.

"That's why we're here," he said, handing her a sandwich.

After all her suspicions, it turned out to be egg.

"Tell me this isn't a drainpipe," Rose muttered, pushing her sodden hair back from her face.

"It isn't a drainpipe."

"What is it, then?"

"It's a conduit for excess surface water," he said, as he stowed his sonic screwdriver in his jacket pocket.

"In other words, it's a drainpipe."

He grinned. "More or less."

"It's the middle of the night, it's freezing, it's raining, and we're hiding in a drainpipe."

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"We're waiting to see what happens."

"Other than we freeze?" she muttered, wrapping her arms tightly around herself.

She thought she'd done a good job of keeping it under her breath, but the Doctor silently took off his leather jacket and handed it to her.

"Won't you be cold?"

"Nah, I'm all right," he said, and Rose gratefully slipped the jacket on. She was still wet and muddy and miserable, but at least she wasn't quite as cold.

The Doctor was practically vibrating with energy, poking his head out of the drainpipe every minute or so and looking up at the sky for some reason.

"I thought you said we were done here," she said once she'd stopped shivering.

"Yeah, mostly."

"Can't we get back to the TARDIS?"

"Can. Don't want to. Not yet." He looked outside again. "Come on, come on," he muttered, looking up at the sky again.

"What are you looking for?"

He didn't answer straight away. Then, grinning, he pointed toward the sky. "That."

Rose scooted forward, trying to get a glimpse of the sky. At first, she couldn't see what he was talking about, but then she saw it: a shooting star, or something similar, she thought, before realizing that it was going up, not down. "What is it?"

"That great rocket of theirs," he said, still grinning wildly. "I tweaked the guidance programs just a bit. It was supposed to come down straight in the middle of the rebel camps."

"And now?"

He pointed straight up, to where the largest of the planet's three moons hung in the sky, looking just a bit smaller than the Earth's moon did. "It'll leave a new crater there, but it won't do any lasting harm."

"Won't they just build another one?"

He shook his head. "If they send up another one, they'll have to explain what happened to the first one, and that'll be completely unacceptable by the standards of their culture. This way, they can say they scrapped the program and decided to negotiate."

"So that's it, then? The war's over? Just like that?"

"Just like that. With a little help from the sonic screwdriver."

"Hey, I'm the one who caused the distraction so you could get inside."

He nodded, still grinning. "How does it feel to have stopped a war?"

She grinned back. "Think we can convince them to invent chips now?"

"You helped save a planet, and all you can think of is chips? Humans; you can't take you lot anywhere." He frowned at her. "Here, give me my jacket back."

She shrugged it off, throwing it at him a bit harder than she really should have. "I've spent half the night cold and wet and hungry, and after helping to save a planet, I think I deserve to get back in the warm and have something to eat. What did you expect?"

"I expect," he said after a moment, "that we should be getting back to the TARDIS." She felt her heart sink--what if he'd decided to take her home, that she wasn't cut out for this after all?--when he grinned, and she realized everything was all right, after all.

"Right, then," she said, crawling out of the pipe after him.

"I'm trying to expand your pathetic horizons," the Doctor muttered. "Obviously, you don't want to, so let's go back to the TARDIS. I'll take you back to London. You can find another job, apologize to that boyfriend of yours for leaving. Give it a few weeks, and you'll never even remember you were gone."

Rose glared at him. "I don't think it's unreasonable to want to know why we're here. It isn't pretty, the planet doesn't seem to be in danger, there's nothing of any significance going on. I mean, the people are nice enough, but we could meet nice people anywhere." Well, maybe not people, she thought. The so-called "last human" hadn't made much of a positive impression on her, but that plumber on the space station had been nice. She might've been blue, but Rose could imagine going out on the town with her, having a few laughs, just like any of her friends back home.

And, well, the Doctor, but he at least looked human, even if he didn't always act it. Even if sometimes he brought her to some primitive planet, where there was a colony of people, or aliens that looked more or less like people, trying to get themselves established before winter, and didn't bother explaining what they were doing there. It wasn't even that she was having a bad time. It was just that she wasn't sure if they'd come here for a reason, and if they hadn't, would it kill the Doctor to just say so?

But no, he had to go around trying to be all mysterious and alien and an annoying git, and Rose wondered if maybe it was just a male thing, and even male aliens weren't immune.

"They're human," he said.

"What?"

"They're human. Well, right now, anyway. In a hundred years or so, there'll be another colony established here, and the two races will end up interbreeding. They'll still be humanoid, though, and the planet turns out rather well. Becomes a major galactic center for medical research, in fact. We'll pop forward a few hundred years when we leave here; let you see how it all turns out."

Oh, now that sounded fascinating, Rose thought. Medical research. Not that she thought medical research was a bad thing; it just wasn't a very interesting thing to watch. Unless they were going to be growing extra arms on people, or something; that might be interesting.

"Well?" the Doctor said. He sounded a bit impatient, like there was something he was waiting for Rose to work out. At least, that was what her teachers had sounded like when they were waiting for her to work something out that they thought ought to be obvious.

And then she caught on. "You wanted me to see how we turned out," she said, quietly. "That it wasn't all like that hateful Cassandra."

He just shrugged. "All in the name of broadening your horizons," he said.

"Thanks," she said, after a moment. She considered apologizing for having complained about having been brought here, but then she decided against it. He'd understand that bit, she thought.

"Shall we go and look around a bit more?" she said, instead, and the Doctor's grin told her that that was all the apology she needed to make.