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This is how he knows her, in his guiltiest moments: the girl he's led astray, the young bright thing he's drawn into darkness and danger and fear. He brings her to the end of her world, lets her watch everything she's ever known burn to nothing, and then he goes and ignores her caution and her human morality and nearly gets her killed a hundred years before her birth. Steals twelve full months of her life from her family and friends, then nearly takes the rest of it for an encore, with launch codes and missiles and her boyfriend's finger on the trigger.
He seduces her, that's the simple truth, with promises of time and space and endless possibility, and there’s nothing fair about it. He issues ultimatums, demands her life be lived on his terms if she's going to travel with him. There's to be no tea with her mother, oh no, and they leave a day after he's had her away for a year.
And he needs her, which is the very worst of it all—needs her smiles and her compassion and her forgiveness, needs her to keep choosing him.
She’s nineteen and human and it’s wrong to put that on her, but he's selfish enough to keep her anyway.
This is how she knows herself: she's been so bored. So very bored, and life isn't bad, exactly, but she's stuck facing dead ends everywhere she looks. What she's had is all she'll ever have, that's what she knows, until a strange, manic man takes her hand and tells her to run.
There's danger, and he's not safe, but it's not until she's dashing over a bridge, a mad grin on her face, that she realizes how much fun danger can be, how tired she is of safe. And maybe he doesn't care about all the same things she cares about, not in the way she cares about them, but it doesn't take her long to see that he does still care. Enough to give his life for a world that isn't his, enough to tell her to run away when he ought to be worried about himself most of all, enough to ask her along and to look hollow with disappointment when she refuses.
So of course she runs to him, right into his box, when he comes back for her. She wants more out of life, and he's offering the universe.
She wants to be more, more than just dead ends and safety, and he thinks she already is.
But then, this is how he knows her after the guiltiest moment of all: the girl who talks a creature bred for hate and murder out of killing, who lives when anyone else would've died, who stands between the last of the Time Lords and the last of the Daleks and tries to save them both. His bright, shining, impossible girl, who smiles at him after he's left her to die and promises to stay with him anyway.
For a moment, just a moment, he believes she can do anything. Believes he's not foul and perverse and taking advantage, because she's above that, beyond that, better than that. Seen it before, hasn't he? She's an alchemist, is Rose Tyler, takes two empty, inadequate little words after the end of the Earth and makes them into everything by grinning up at him and dragging him off for chips. 'There's me', and then 'me too', and then 'do it'--such small words to carry all the wonder and weight of the universe.