you had me at goodbye.
you had me at goodbye, Eleven/Rose, PG, AU, set right before season 8 premiere.
There is a cave in the woods and though she has never gone in, she knows there is a pair of very old, very blue doors waiting for her. A siren's song she resists on a daily, hourly, minutely basis, whispering no, whispering home. Doors that go nowhere and doors that go everywhere. 1, 323 words.
A/N: HELLO. I am not dead anymore! I mean, I was dead, but now I am back and I am excited and I hope everyone is willing to bear with me because it's been so long since I wrote fic.
One day, in the middle of spring, she gets a letter.
Which would be fine (and it is fine), only she never gets letters anymore. She is not supposed get letters. Everyone she used to know is dead now, so really, who is there left to send letters?
Rose ignores it.
She drinks lukewarm tea and shoves it behind a toaster, tosses her gold and bronze sandy hair like the ocean wave tosses against the beach she takes nightly walks on. No return address, no name, not even hers. How did it manage to find her? But no, she bites her lip and pretends that the stars are as bright as they were decades ago, as bright as they were one night too many nights away when a man pointed at the sky and plucked journeys from distant suns like a child pointing at random in a candy store.
The next day there is another letter. She shoves that one behind the toaster too. Maybe if they are ignored, whoever is sending them will stop, so she decides to go camping. Throws on a red coat and hides beneath the generous lip of the hood as she treks out into the mountains and woods. There is a cave in the woods and though she has never gone in, she knows there is a pair of very old, very blue doors waiting for her. A siren's song she resists on a daily, hourly, minutely basis, whispering no, whispering home. Doors that go nowhere and doors that go everywhere.
Doors that don't (shouldn't) exist.
Melancholy and warmth mingle, wriggle, tight and loose in the hollows of her bones; it almost reminds her of times when this was exciting, when she was running and there was always something chasing, when running felt defiant and young instead of shallow and cowardly. Rose is older now, much, much older, and it is something she cannot hide, something she cannot run from. Like his death. Like the death of everyone she has ever loved until loving has become hard and lonely.
(On her birthdays, she thinks of Jack and hopes he doesn't hate her for this.)
Only every day, one at a time, the letters keep coming, all these different colors and all these different stamps and all different times -- no one uses 1840 One Penny Black stamps anymore or for that matter has seen them outside of a museum; from all over the world they come until eventually she cannot keep shoving them behind the toaster. Not even TARDIS blue envelopes tempt her. Much.
One at a time, they come. Her eyes are swimming with dead suns and closed doors as they fall, fall, fall, caught on a sudden, impossible shape at the corner of all the envelopes. A wolf hidden in the lines, buried in the mundane. She seizes the papers and tears through them, consumes them, and surrenders.
This life of hers is over.
(He is impatient, even when he is saying goodbye.)
"Where's Amy and Rory?"
It is the first question she asks him when she comes back, because they were good for him, in the end. Because he should never travel alone. Because he wrote about them in every forbidden word and then he didn't write about them at all. Those so-fair-they're-invisible eyebrows droop and green-grey swirls of color swamp her vision for half a moment before the TARDIS control panel has his complete, undivided attention once more.
"Gone. Happy." He says the last word with the quirk of a smile that chills her to the core. As proud of them as a very indulgent and very tired parent.
Like a compass pointing to true north, she is drawn to him, against all of her better judgement. She really should know better. He has always made the dead things in her sing; for her Doctor she is so fearless it hurts. That was the way of things with the Doctor; he breathed life and wonder into earth and laughter, made brave those who he never wanted in the fray.
"I'm glad." For them. For you, Rose doesn't say, but she holds him tight and he bends his body around her, cleaves to her, all the time between them collapsed into a single embrace, captured by his long nose buried in her hair, his seeking palms hot against her back.
"Please, Rose," he says, so quiet it should be hard to hear, so quiet she should have never heard him again, "Please."
*
They sit together, by the heart of the TARDIS, and somewhere between not knowing him and loving him he has slipped back into her life and rested his head against hers. His hair is longer now and it flops into his face teasingly, mocking her. Her heart swells full for him and his bow tie, for bracers that are dangling off his bony shoulders. "How long has it been for you? Since - since us?"
The Doctor flicks a look at her, apprising, a small and grim smile on his face. "Roughly three centuries. Give or take a few decades, it's very complicated keeping track of time when, well, you know." That's a lie, of course. He knows exactly how long it has been. "And you?"
Rose hesitates. This is going to hurt him, she knows. "One hundred and ten. Did you know, Doctor? Did you know I'd end up like..." A turn of a her wrist and a flash of her hands. "This?"
And she is right. This does hurt him, but she has to know. She just has to.
"No, no of course not. I was supposed to have saved you from it - I thought I did," he protests, pained, soft agony as he grips her hands like he would convince her of the truth by simply willing it into being.
Rose lets the silence between them stretch for a little bit. He really has changed. Time was when she couldn't get him to shut up.
"You did," she says at last, and lets go of the wound that has been crippling her all along.
(She asks him later why he did that, draw those wolves into the squiggly lines of all those stamps, and he swears it wasn't him. He swears it. If something can be remembered... she creates herself - she always has.)
*
"Why," the word is bleary and sleep laden even as her hand valiantly sneaks out from beneath their blankets to gesture fitfully at the open door, "Are you dressed like a monk? At 6 in the morning?"
He is grinning infectiously, stupendously, so brightly she wants to throw her pillow at him. So she does. "Not a monk. Just popped out for a bit of quiet, needed to think. But then the phone started ringing! The phone! The one that never rings!"
Still can't get him to shut up.
Rose looks at him suspiciously. "Yes, I know. Hope they aren't looking for their mummy again." She grouses, but trades her pajamas for proper clothes and pretends not to smirk at how his eyes follow her every movement with an absentminded greed.
"Alright then. Let's go answer that phone. This is a call box, isn't it?"
She kisses him on her way out. He smiles like a loony, so wide his face should hurt.
Maybe it's more like a snog box now.