thus can my love excuse: a doctor who story
thus can my love excuse
a Doctor Who story
by June Whitfield
Copyright 2006
PG
Summary: Sometimes happy endings are deserved, rather than earned.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Oh, bugger.
Notes: Slight spoilers for School Reunion and the rest of what we've seen of the past season and definite spoilers for the season before that. Absolute thanks to dotfic, wiliqueen and celli for the lovely BETA and feedback, and for making me confident about posting this.
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The Universe almost explodes and she's a witness to it. There's fire, smoke and monsters, and she almost dies. So does everyone else, and she is very frightened for what feels like a very long time. And then they're quite safe and they've saved the Universe again, and she's at home again and it's Do you want some more tea from her mother and more coddling from Mickey, even though he was there too. They're okay, and the Doctor smiles at her over the Thai takeout they got from the new place around the corner.
She still can't breathe.
Then it's a day and a half afterward (in her room, wrapped in her blankets, sick with heat), and Rose decides that she doesn't want to be a part of this anymore. That she doesn't want to be a Sarah Jane (and she feels horribly guilty for thinking that way but she can't help her thoughts anymore) and that that she doesn't want to be left off but that she doesn't want to stay, either.
She comes to see him on the roof where he's sitting, and watches him as he talks about where they'll go next, and when she tells him she won't be going her voice is calm and quiet. When he responds, his voice is both calm and broken at the same time, and for the first time in a long time she wonders how things would have been if she'd said no the first time. Or the second time. Or the third time.
She decides that she won't be wondering anything anymore. He doesn't try to convince her otherwise like she thought he would, and Rose hates him for that, just a little.
She doesn't cry when she watches the TARDIS disappear from her street corner. She doesn't cry when she sits in front of the telly with her hands in her lap. She doesn't cry when she goes to bed. She doesn't cry when she gets up in the morning two hours too late.
She doesn't cry until she cuts herself on a splinter from the door into her room the night after because the sight of her own red blood is so ordinary, so normal, that it gives her terrible heat flashes, and she throws up the toast she'd had for breakfast before crawling into bed and crying there some more. Her mother is too afraid to say or do anything.
She stays in bed for hours before the sight of her ragged, unwashed hair turns her stomach, and she gets up wash it, scrubbing at her roots and skin like she's dirty, and in a way she is. She wants to wash every inch of him from her skin, from her hands and from her feet. She is pink and raw when she emerges two hours later and thanks God that the mirror is too fogged up for her to see herself.
Mickey calls later. They sit in the room together and they don't say a word, and that is all her fault, and she doesn't feel guilty at all.
The next day is sunny, like the weatherman said it was going to be, and she takes the bus and walks to where she remembers Clive's house being. The sight of boards across the windows make her wonder why she got out of bed at all.
She takes the bus back to downtown and sits on a bridge ledge across from the London Eye, and takes out the little notebook she stored in her purse when she grabbed her keys, digging out a pen from the outer pocket. She scribbles words that barely make sense next to each other, and then she rips the page from the spiral and crumples it in her hand, which is sweaty and hot, before throwing it into the water. She stays there until it gets dark and cold.
She is only a little proud, in a strange, detached sort of way, that she realized only two days afterward that he wasn't coming back for her.
South Croydon is very quiet, familiar in a lethargic sort of way. Sarah Jane's house has a porch and a swing and Sarah Jane. Rose sits on the couch feeling very sick and tired, and is given biscuits and tarts and tea, which she doesn't throw up. Sarah Jane is beautiful and sort of like an aunt that Rose never had. She sits next to Rose on the couch and strokes Rose's hair when she cries and lets her stay overnight after she promises that her mother won't mind. They talk a very long time, late into the night.
The next morning Rose goes to the college and fills out forms. Three A-levels. She always wished she were smarter, and now she doesn't have the excuse not to try.
She goes to the library and opens book after book after book after book. She finds him in all sorts of places. She photocopies the whole lot, takes the pages home, folds them up and puts them in a box and puts the box away. And then it is documented, and she feels better for having solid material telling her that she's not crazy.
School takes a long time. A long enough time for Mickey to stop trying (and he's not surprised, she knows he's not), a long enough time for her mother to give up on things ever becoming normal again. A long enough time that while she's working late into the night, exhausted, eating close to nothing, she forgets; and forgetting is the best reward she could have ever given herself. When she moves out of her mother's apartment, the box of memories comes with her, and finds a new home under her bed.
When the results from the exams come she lets her mother fuss. And it's a whole new world that opens in front of her, like a bursting dam, all rushing and piling and moving, and her relief is tangible. Her mother makes coffee cake and lets her lick the spoon, and places a long-forgotten birthday candle in the middle, and that is that.
She takes her first teaching job at a high school in Albany Park, substituting for the history teacher, and the headmaster likes her so much she's hired full time. Teaching becomes her world. Bright minds, all of them, and she finds herself reaching out to more than one student, taking them by the hand and drawing out the equations of life slowly, letting them understand. She learns from her students, and they learn from her. She has students coming in after school to discuss theories. Within two years her class is the one that children make envious clicking noises with their tongues about.
She meets David Scott in her second year of teaching. He likes subtitled foreign films and wears bright white trainers when he teaches physics. He asks her out for coffee one day in the teacher's lounge, and they spend the whole afternoon talking about the probability of paradoxes. He takes her to a fireworks show the next day, and stargazing, and Rose finds that she likes the way he grins: one side of his mouth lifting first, and then the other following suit. Two months later he asks her to marry him. She can't think of a reason not to. They marry in late June, and in all of her photographs she is smiling.
They have two children. Lizzie first and Jack two years later. Lizzie has bright, blonde hair like her mother, and Jack looks so much like his father with his strong little chin. They grow like wild things, springing out from the ground like bright flowers, and she watches in quiet wonder as they cry and laugh and live. She is a mother now. She kisses the hurt away from fingers and from knees. She has never been happier.
She is nearing fifty-four, having seen her daughter married and her son engaged, when one afternoon on a routine check-up her doctor finds a lump in her left breast.
Life slows down a bit after that, and the thought of irony doesn't escape her, but she pushes those thoughts away and concentrates on living the way she should be.
When she is finally so weak that she is moved to the hospital, her family comes and visits every day. Lizzie brings little Michael to touch his grandmother's hands, and her room's white walls are soon covered in finger paintings and crayon drawings. Jack brings her the news from the town and his fiance, once or twice. David spends most of his time in the plastic chair next to her bed.
One afternoon she wakes up from a quiet, sweet nap in which she'd been having such lovely dreams, and in the disoriented haze finds to her pleasant surprise that there is someone new in the chair next to her. A young man, and she thinks she knows him for a moment or two before she realizes that she's never seen him before in her life. She asks politely for his name, her hands shaking a bit from the strain that comes with pretending to be coherent, and he responds that she can call him John. She apologizes for the weak greeting -- she's not herself, if only he'd come last week, she'd been feeling better then -- and he laughs gently and wraps his fingers around hers and says that it's alright, he's glad that he could come at all.
"Were you one of my students?" She asks, trying to blink the fog from her eyes. "I'm sorry -- that's rude. It's hard to remember faces --"
"I'm not offended," he says. "Yes, I was. A long time ago."
"Thank you for coming," she says thickly, smiling and patting his hand. "I'm so sorry I didn't recognize you."
He smiles his wry smile again and she does find something familiar after all. "I wanted to see you again. Just to say thank you."
"Sometimes I learned more from you students than I meant to teach you," she says gently, and he tips his head in understanding. They talk for a bit about things like the weather and flowers and the definition of names. He holds onto her hand for the entire time. She asks once or twice where he's living now, and he brushes off the question with one of his own. She tells him as much as she can, as much as she has time or energy for, until the nurse pokes her head in and tells them that visitation hours are over. He laughs at her annoyed and coarse curse at the hospital system, and leaves half an hour later than he's supposed to, leaving her for some restful sleep and a warm feeling of pleasure resting at the small of her back.
The night before her death Rose takes a piece of paper from the notebook she'd brought to the hospital with her and writes a few sentences in what's meant to be a letter to David about hope and love, but she grows too tired and weak to continue; so she rips the sheet from the spiral with shaking hands, and pushes it underneath her pillow.
And then she sleeps.
Breathing has never come easier.