Fic: In this valley of dying stars.
Rose Tyler is twenty-five when the Bad Wolf stirs.
It comes to her in dreams mostly. Yellow eyes staring back into hers, rough fur sliding across her skin and low growls mingling with her screams.
Her mum finds her in the kitchen in the darkest hour before dawn and softly kisses her forehead.
“Can’t sleep?” she asks softly.
“No,” Rose murmurs. Won’t. She closes her eyes and hugs her mother who smells of baby powder, milk and old universes left behind.
Eventually, she is too weary to keep the dreams at bay so she lets the Wolf take her along in the night. She burns like the sun.
The next morning at work, Mickey asks for her help investigating a body found nearly torn apart near her house. (There is something of the Wolf about you) He does not look her in the eye.
Rose Tyler is forty-five when the Bad Wolf finds the vortex again.
She is sitting alone (no surprise there then, she thinks) in her office, tinkering with a broken device she stripped off the body of a dying alien earlier that day. If it’s alien it’s ours. Some things do not change. Everything else changes.
Rose stands up and stretches, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror. No different from yesterday. No different from any other day.
She blinks and she feels an old forgotten rush.
finallyfinallyfinally.
She’s travelling through time. She wakes up in Ancient Rome, alone and so very out of place. She can’t understand the people around her who crowd and point. She laughs wildly anyway. She blinks again. She gasps as freezing, polluted water floods her lungs and she wildly kicks herself to the surface. She opens her eyes and knows she is in the colony of Albany in the year three million and forty-two of the Second Intergalactic Rule. Knowledge flows through her veins and the Bad Wolf smiles with her.
Rose feels the turn of the planet and she screams in delight when she realizes she is falling through space. The Bad Wolf catches her. She remembers him.
She learns after hundreds of tries how to return home. (She tries to forget forgotten cities, destroyed civilizations, violent revolutions, and lost companions). She returns a week too late and misses her mother’s funeral. Her brother does not look her in the eye.
Rose Tyler is ninety-five when the Bad Wolf claims her as its own.
On the planet of Hesperides, it takes her memories of her family. Her brother’s tenth birthday, her mother’s last laugh and her father’s cologne. It takes Mickey’s grin from her without a second thought. It even takes the fading memories of her grandfather and the way his cigarrete ---
She shakes her head as the memories fall loosely out of her head as she falls asleep in the garden on the shore of the world-ocean.
She is in Delphi playing at Oracle when she forgets her Universe. Shareen’s giggles and Jimmy’s smirks and Jack’s jokes. She smiles wistfully for a moment, a moment that she loses in an instant.
The Bad Wolf takes her first Doctor next. He takes away slow dancing and dying fathers. She struggles to keep them as she sees flashes of shop dummies, the dying earth and aliens from Raxicori---
oh well, she’s quite forgotten. It lets her keep glowing light and the insistent pressure of his lips and the feeling of all of creation running through her veins, her blood teeming with power and all of time in her grasp. (fantastic)
The Bad Wolf waits to take away her last Doctor. It takes her into the beginning of the universe and lays her gently among the brightening stars. It coaxes out of her Cybermen and impossible planets. The Bad Wolf isn’t surprised when she relinquishes French almost-queens (She’s waited so much longer than five and a half hours now, Doctor) and abandons reporters from Aberdeen-no Croydon. No, the Bad Wolf isn’t surprised at all. (It knows Rose Tyler more thoroughly than anyone in this universe or the other. Better than him) they lay among the stars for eons as Rose savours and then unlearns victory hugs and impromptu kisses. It takes the memories as Rose sleeps and when she wakes, she weeps until she has forgotten why.
The Bad Wolf takes Rose Tyler to a planet of mirrors to see who she has become. Rose Tyler cannot look herself in the eye.
Rose Tyler is one hundred and thirty-five when the Bad Wolf takes her completely.
She is walking through a marketplace, a billion miles from Earth when she stops being Rose Tyler. She’s not even human anymore.
The Wolf breathes in old dusty air and misses Rose Tyler.
The Wolf is thinking about Rose Tyler (that never-ending heartbeat still thudthudthudding in its head even now when all other traces of her have gone) when it sees a murder. No---it will see a murder. Or perhaps it has already seen the murder. So the Bad Wolf stops it the only way it knows how.
This is how the Doctor finds a body that used to be Rose Tyler---shackled, bloody and growling in a jail that was very hard to break into, even when you have the sonic screwdriver.
“Rose?” he asks and he is bouncing around and he sounds impossibly happy and in love. The Bad Wolf cannot look him in the eye.