Rose: "I was at home.... No, I wasn't. I was in the TARDIS...." The Doctor sneaks a glance down at his hand, where golden glimmers shiver across his skin. "...I can't remember anything else." He looks over at her, uneasy, and she just shakes her head. He smiles at her when she catches him staring. Memorizing. "Rose Tyler," he laughs sadly, and with so much love. "I was gonna take you to so many places. Barcelona. Not the city Barcelona, the planet. You'd love it. Fantastic place -- they've got dogs with no noses!" He laughs. My dad used to tell us that one. ("How's he smell?" "Terrible!") Rose rolls her eyes and laughs. "Imagine how many times a day you end up telling that joke, and it's still funny!" She asks why they can't go there, then. "Maybe you will," he says. And this is where the awful starts. "And maybe I will. But not like this." He smiles tinily down at the monitors. I imagine he's hurting. He already said goodbye to us, and to Rose: this is just getting her for what happens next. You can hurt, but don't be worried. He's still going to be wonderful.

Rose gets up and yells that the Doctor isn't making sense, and he smiles: "I might never make sense again! I might have two heads. Or no head! Imagine me with no head! And don't say that's an improvement...." And the painful thing is, because we know, we have to watch her laugh along with him, that grin that says she doesn't get the joke, not really. That she's not really ready. The Doctor: "But it's a bit dodgy, this process. You never know what you're gonna end up with --" And a huge blast of light comes out of him, shoving his backwards. He clutches painfully at his stomach and Rose rushes forward. "Stay away!" the Doctor shouts, urgently, wincing as she stares. Rose franticly yells, "Doctor, tell me what's going on." He's still trying to keep it light. "I absorbed all the energy of the time vortex. No one's meant to do that!" It's getting to him: "Every cell in my body's dying." She asks the Doctor whether he can't do something about it, and he says -- and it's pretty funny, in the midst of this goodbye -- "Yeah, I'm doing it now!" He explains that Time Lords have a trick where they can cheat death, and then might as well be talking to us again: "Except...it means I'm gonna change." She shakes her head, still not clear on it. "...And I'm not gonna see you again. Not like this. Not with this daft old face." He laughs. He is so fantastic: "And before I go..." Rose tells him to cram it, and he says her name, just once, in a way that anyone would back down: "Before I go, I just wanna tell you..." -- and the pride, and the love in it -- "...you were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic."