Title: Acres of longing
Author: flowsoffire
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing/characters: Rose Tyler, Ten, reference to Bad Wolf!Rose
Genre: Romance/Drama
Rating: K+
Word count: c. 300
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
Summary: Rose Tyler dreams too vivid, and cannot forget. Post-Doomsday drabble.
Author's note: This fic is set after Doomsday-well, technically it might be considered to be /during/ Doomsday, since I didn't take into account the meeting between Ten and Rose on Bad Wolf Bay. I wrote it all in one go before I'd rewatched the episode, I didn't remember clearly that the calling had come in her dreams, and then I tried to work it in, but it just didn't feel right with the flow of the rest. It also features many references to The Parting of the Ways. Title comes from lyrics from the song Landscape by Florence + The Machine. Enjoy!
Every night for the next few months, she dreams that the Doctor is coming for her.
He’s got two faces she loves equally and two hearts drumming against her chest when he pulls her into an embrace and just doesn’t let go. Sometimes he’s there, and it feels like liquid fire running through her veins instead of blood, when he approaches her. Sometimes he is slipping away-a voice, a fantasized touch, a mere brush of air. She can taste desperation then, like copper on her tongue, and the fierce craving to scream, to run, do something and reach him. Twice left behind (twice aved) and she has no magical machine to take her back to his side this time. Three times’ the charm, she thinks in her dreams, as she tries and tries again.
But nothing works, and nothing ever will and nothing ever should.
Things are coming back to her from the last time, just a haze of tingling light and a feeling of immensity, wide enough to crush her thin as sand. She vaguely knows it is a memory of saving him-and killing him. He told her that, and she’s never known exactly how; now that, too, is lost to her forever. She wakes up in streams of tears each time-but she does that all too often these days.
He told her, that first time, to have a good life, but when Rose Tyler loves she never listens. She keeps watching, and waiting, and waking to shudders and his name on her lips. One day, she feels, and swears it stubbornly to her irate family-one day the Doctor will need her. She knows it in her bones, and it keeps her standing.
One day something will happen, a miracle, and she’ll come back for him.