Untitled - TARDIS Big Bang

"Hey," Grace said, poking her head around the corner of Rose's open door. "Saw you come in. Got a
minute?"
"Sure," Rose said. Grace entered, wearing a set of scrubs liberally streaked with something brown. "Oh,
god, don't tell me we have a case already."
"What? Oh." She tugged on her scrubs. "I was assisting Varma with something that fell out of the Rift.
Turned out not to be as dead as we thought it was when we started the autopsy."
"Ew," Rose concluded. "Is that what you wanted to talk about?"
Grace leaned against the door. "No, no, I just wanted to apologize for ambushing you last week with the
party." She flashed a small smile. "It was mostly my idea, and I guess I didn't think it through very well."
Rose shook her head. "Don't worry about it. I appreciated the sentiment, that's the important part."
"I just...I didn't know about Mickey," Grace said with a shrug. "It wasn't the best way for that to get out."
"We hadn't told anyone yet, not officially," Rose said quietly. "So it's just as much my fault as yours."
She nodded. "Still, for what it's worth..."
"Yeah, thanks. Apology accepted." Since they were already talking about it, Rose braced herself, and
went onto the main document server to find the forms necessary to register the missing and the dead.
"Has anyone closed his file yet?"
Grace shook her head. "Jake and Tosh swept his apartment and packed up his things, but most of the
paperwork is yours." She paused. "Is he...I mean, you don't have to answer if you don't want to, because
I know this is personal. But I wanted to ask...is he happy, over there? Is that why he stayed?"
Rose considered Grace for a moment. She'd always treated Mickey with a mix of motherly nagging and
grouchy sarcasm, but they'd still worked together for nearly a year. Tosh had worked with him even
before Rose had come across the Void—she'd helped to develop the dimension-jumping technology—
though they obviously weren't as close as Mickey and Jake had been. Mickey and Jake had liberated
Paris together, for God's sake. So many people he'd worked with, made friends with, and Mickey only
seemed to care about his gran and...
"I guess so," Rose said quickly, and looked back down at her keyboard. "I mean, I hope so. He made his
choice."
Grace nodded. "Yeah, we have to live with that." She looked at Rose sharply. "If you want to, you know,
talk about it...I mean, I know you two were close..."
"I'll be fine," Rose said, a little more harshly than she meant to. Then she forced a smile. "Really. It'll be
okay. We'll all learn to live with it, right?"
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