This story takes this deleted scene as canon.
The Doctor doesn’t mean for it to be a big secret. It’s a surprise, anyway, not a secret at all, and the two are very different things. The distinction doesn’t seem to make much difference to Rose, or prevent her knickers from getting in a proper twist over the whole thing.
He hadn’t expected to find the exact supplies he needed, tucked away in the corners of certain Torchwood vaults and accessed by way of psychic paper and quick talking. With Donna’s suggestions for accelerating the growth of the TARDIS coral, the new TARDIS has grown even faster than the Doctor had imagined possible. Shatterfrying the plasmic shell had been tricky – and had singed his eyebrows and sublimated a nearby frozen pond right into vapor, leaving a dry hole in the ground afterward and landing him in Pete Tyler’s Torchwood office for a conversation about environmental impact and how touchy certain city councils can be about unexpectedly pond-less parks. (Not a peep said between them about his eyebrows, though.) The Doctor had modified the TARDIS’ dimensional stabilizer to a foldback harmonic of 36.3 (without sublimating a single drop of water, thankyouverymuch), and the growth hadn’t just accelerated by the power of fifty-nine; it had accelerated by the power of two hundred and fifty-nine!
Brilliant, brilliant Donna Noble.
Which means that after only four weeks in this universe, zeppelins in the sky and Rose Tyler in the Doctor’s life again on a daily basis, the TARDIS is practically vortex-worthy.
He just wishes things were going so well with Rose.
It’s not that things are going poorly, necessarily. But slowly. So slowly, he can feel his cells aging, his hair turning grey, his wrinkles deepening.
He didn’t expect things to pick up exactly where they’d left off, before Canary Wharf. Hand-holding, the easy way they were around each other, so in-tune on practically everything. No, he hadn’t had expectations. But he won’t deny, there had been quite a bit of hope.
Then there was an additional hope that blossomed into existence with that kiss on the beach in Norway, a hope that picking up where they’d left off meant things would keep moving on that trajectory – lips meeting lips, that was certainly nice. Arms wrapping around each other’s bodies, well that was more than nice. Long hugs, less clothing, the Doctor wouldn’t mind something along those lines.
At this point, the Doctor has decided he’d settle for Rose actually slowing down long enough to say something – anything – she’s thinking and feeling. Not that the Doctor’s setting any bars, in that regard; he gets this cold feeling in his chest (on the side without the heart) when he opens his mouth and tries to say the words again (I love you, Rose Tyler), or when he tries to ask her what she’s thinking (nineteen years old and she was an open book, twenty-six and she’s a sphinx, are all human women so maddening?), or when he tries to ask whether or not she might still feel a bit of love for him in return (is he emotionally demanding? Is that the sort of man he is now? Emotionally demanding and not ginger?).
