fic: shelf life
Title: Shelf Life
Rating: PG
Notes: Spoilers for Doctor Who, season one finale
This story brought you to by: Extreme amounts of angst. Rose-flavored angst. Bring umbrellas.
* * * * *
Betrayal.
It coats the back of Rose’s throat, clouds her thoughts, and turns her hands and heart to ice. Betrayal, mixed with the quick burn of despair.
He lied to me.
She realizes it, the words running through her head like a mantra endlessly repeating, as she calls out his name, a question and a plea together in one word. She abandons the controls-useless, useless!-and races for the door, with the words in her head and the despair on her tongue. Colors flash and engines grind as she slams full-tilt into the unforgiving coral-metal-glass hybrid that is the inner door of the TARDIS. She raps her fists helplessly, screams through the door-What are you doing? Let me out! What have you done?-and slowly, slowly the truth of it crawls past her defenses, blindsides her, physical as a blow and ten times as painful.
He lied. He lied. He’s sending me away.
Her screams intensify, rising above the roar of the engines, fueled by her panic, her fear, her absolute powerlessness in the face of this unexpected duplicity of the Doctor’s. The entire TARDIS is shaking now, a sensation she is familiar and even comfortable with because it means that she is home, here where she never quite knows where she could end up and doesn’t quite care as long, because being in the TARDIS keeps her together with her Doctor.
This time, it is entirely the opposite, and she yearns with every fiber of her soul for the shaking to stop, for the machinery to subside, and for the doors to open, so that she can run back out into the control room of the Game Station and give the Doctor a sound telling-off for trying to pull this idiotic, insane, desperate ploy.
She hears his voice behind her, and hope floods her like a tidal wave-only to drown in the despair when she realizes that it is only a hologram, and not her Doctor-a pitiful copy, not the flesh and blood man she wants, needs, to return to. She listens in dumbfounded horror when it says I’m dead, and thinks dully, No. Not my Doctor. He can’t be. He can’t.
She springs into action when she hears where the TARDIS is taking her, but is stopped short by the hologram’s perfect, painfully perfect recording of the Doctor’s exasperation with her. Tears burn hotly in her eyes and throat when it says the TARDIS cannot return to her Doctor, when it tells her to let this beautiful machine, and all the memories she has gathered with it, die alone and invisible and forgotten. When it turns and looks straight into her eyes with the same kick of power that jolts her every time the Doctor looks at her. When it asks her quietly to live-without him.
When it fades away, she battles back the tears and makes another attempt to defy the Doctor’s orders, the TARDIS’s programming, destiny’s cruelty. She wills the TARDIS to stop, begs for it, prays.
When it does, when the silence and the stillness descend, she knows-deep in her heart she knows with a kind of certainty that brings her entire world crashing down at once-exactly where she is. She stands very, very still for a few seconds, letting that certainty sink deeper, letting it chill her down to the bone.
And still she dares to hope. Still she makes one final, frantic wish.
When she races for the door this time, it opens without the slightest bit of hesitation. The sunlight beams into her eyes, blinding her, and the cold breeze sweeps around her. But it doesn’t matter. She is already frozen inside, and she has already seen.
Something-she wants it to be determination, but it isn’t, not with that deadly, destructive certainty in her heart-drives her back into the TARDIS, back to the controls. She screams with frustration, yanks levers, slams buttons. Her mind is frightfully blank where it should be racing with ideas on how to return to the Doctor, how to operate the TARDIS; she almost feels likes she’s watching herself dashing about with a calm sense of detachment, like she’s the TARDIS itself, held apart from Rose Tyler, watching her scramble for a way, any way, to go back.
It breaks her heart to finally think, I can’t reach him now.
And then she’s somehow trudging to the door again, defeated, battered, lost. She can see her future stretching in front her. Can see herself: a shadow of Rose Tyler, fading back into the mundane world, the busy London streets, two hundred thousand, one hundred years away from the only reason she can think of that anything should matter anymore.
Can see herself: a strange little thing, standing on a street corner. Gathering dust, no one bothering her, no one noticing.
The world moves on.
Rating: PG
Notes: Spoilers for Doctor Who, season one finale
This story brought you to by: Extreme amounts of angst. Rose-flavored angst. Bring umbrellas.
* * * * *
Betrayal.
It coats the back of Rose’s throat, clouds her thoughts, and turns her hands and heart to ice. Betrayal, mixed with the quick burn of despair.
He lied to me.
She realizes it, the words running through her head like a mantra endlessly repeating, as she calls out his name, a question and a plea together in one word. She abandons the controls-useless, useless!-and races for the door, with the words in her head and the despair on her tongue. Colors flash and engines grind as she slams full-tilt into the unforgiving coral-metal-glass hybrid that is the inner door of the TARDIS. She raps her fists helplessly, screams through the door-What are you doing? Let me out! What have you done?-and slowly, slowly the truth of it crawls past her defenses, blindsides her, physical as a blow and ten times as painful.
He lied. He lied. He’s sending me away.
Her screams intensify, rising above the roar of the engines, fueled by her panic, her fear, her absolute powerlessness in the face of this unexpected duplicity of the Doctor’s. The entire TARDIS is shaking now, a sensation she is familiar and even comfortable with because it means that she is home, here where she never quite knows where she could end up and doesn’t quite care as long, because being in the TARDIS keeps her together with her Doctor.
This time, it is entirely the opposite, and she yearns with every fiber of her soul for the shaking to stop, for the machinery to subside, and for the doors to open, so that she can run back out into the control room of the Game Station and give the Doctor a sound telling-off for trying to pull this idiotic, insane, desperate ploy.
She hears his voice behind her, and hope floods her like a tidal wave-only to drown in the despair when she realizes that it is only a hologram, and not her Doctor-a pitiful copy, not the flesh and blood man she wants, needs, to return to. She listens in dumbfounded horror when it says I’m dead, and thinks dully, No. Not my Doctor. He can’t be. He can’t.
She springs into action when she hears where the TARDIS is taking her, but is stopped short by the hologram’s perfect, painfully perfect recording of the Doctor’s exasperation with her. Tears burn hotly in her eyes and throat when it says the TARDIS cannot return to her Doctor, when it tells her to let this beautiful machine, and all the memories she has gathered with it, die alone and invisible and forgotten. When it turns and looks straight into her eyes with the same kick of power that jolts her every time the Doctor looks at her. When it asks her quietly to live-without him.
When it fades away, she battles back the tears and makes another attempt to defy the Doctor’s orders, the TARDIS’s programming, destiny’s cruelty. She wills the TARDIS to stop, begs for it, prays.
When it does, when the silence and the stillness descend, she knows-deep in her heart she knows with a kind of certainty that brings her entire world crashing down at once-exactly where she is. She stands very, very still for a few seconds, letting that certainty sink deeper, letting it chill her down to the bone.
And still she dares to hope. Still she makes one final, frantic wish.
When she races for the door this time, it opens without the slightest bit of hesitation. The sunlight beams into her eyes, blinding her, and the cold breeze sweeps around her. But it doesn’t matter. She is already frozen inside, and she has already seen.
Something-she wants it to be determination, but it isn’t, not with that deadly, destructive certainty in her heart-drives her back into the TARDIS, back to the controls. She screams with frustration, yanks levers, slams buttons. Her mind is frightfully blank where it should be racing with ideas on how to return to the Doctor, how to operate the TARDIS; she almost feels likes she’s watching herself dashing about with a calm sense of detachment, like she’s the TARDIS itself, held apart from Rose Tyler, watching her scramble for a way, any way, to go back.
It breaks her heart to finally think, I can’t reach him now.
And then she’s somehow trudging to the door again, defeated, battered, lost. She can see her future stretching in front her. Can see herself: a shadow of Rose Tyler, fading back into the mundane world, the busy London streets, two hundred thousand, one hundred years away from the only reason she can think of that anything should matter anymore.
Can see herself: a strange little thing, standing on a street corner. Gathering dust, no one bothering her, no one noticing.
The world moves on.