The Doctor sighed. "Time's not a straight line, Rose. It's fully of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...stuff." Clearly, a sentence that contained those words never quite went out the same way it'd started. Oh well. "It's in flux, at any rate. And I've a time machine. You'd think that you'd be used to this by now," he teased, tugging on her hair affectionately. "From speaking to Jack about things, I reckon that this Jareth character pulled you lot from a different point in your personal time lines than he did me. It happened, Rose. Just...for you...not yet," he shrugged. Made perfect sense to him, at any rate.

"I do what I can," he said with a little smile, stroking her hair and brushing the last of her tears off of her cheeks. Then he leaned in and kissed her forehead before resting his against it, closing his eyes and letting out a sigh. "I'd thought I'd lost you. Again. I don't think I can survive it a third time." And that was quite enough of that, so he pulled back and winked at her. "I like this face, after all."