(no subject)
Title: She Falls Through Holes
Author: biggrstaffbunch
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be." It occurs to Rose that Hell is not at all like one would think. [Doomsday AU]
A/N: Part 1 of Into the Howling trilogy. This is for goldy_dollar for being all-around awesome and thank you so much to sandwch_zombie for the beta!
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It's strange what a person will remember in when they're busy dying. Just ask Rose.
(And bloody Christ, one day she hopes that won't be the go-to phrase whenever something vaguely horrifying, completely strange, or remotely otherworldly occurs. "Cat in a nun's wimple? Terrible! Just ask Rose.")
What she calls to mind's eye now is this:
A memory of that time after Sarah Jane and eighteenth-century France, when weighty realizations began to creep under overly bright smiles and in between fingers desperately intertwined. There was a strange quiet that surrounded the TARDIS in those days because stripped of their defenses, the Doctor and Rose skirted truths far more closely than they ever did in the light of the outside world.
One day, standing in front of the central column, the green glow of the TARDIS shrouding his face in appropriately alien light, the Doctor said:
"I've died nine times before, you know. This is my tenth body."
Wiggled his fingers and grinned, silliness and a secret, sullen spite, a message clear in the dark of his gaze. There was life before you, Rose Tyler, and there will be life after you.
Rose let it pass, then. Because despite the Doctor's attempts at distance, she's always known that whatever he turned into at Time War's end, it belongs to her in ways that remain unquantifiable. Regardless of before or what will happen after, she possesses pieces of who he was at that exact point of time, entire swaths of the figure he became once the fires of Gallifrey stopped burning. His pain, his isolation, his guilt, his helpless, hapless love, it's all intrinsically her own because he gave them to her like gifts, until one day he didn't even laugh when she promised him forever.
(Oh, there are other things, of course. The curve of his lips, the slope of his nose, the varying flares of his varying ears. The cells that made up and make up the Doctor and his irrepressible, irreversible self. All of that belongs to Rose, too, nestled in the map of her brain, catalogued in every breath that she draws.)
Right at this moment, though, it is the irony of the Doctor's proclamation that is getting to Rose. After all, he's had ten regenerations, ten lives lived over a span of almost nine centuries, and Rose hasn't even finished her twentieth year before the first and last life she'll ever get is at its end.
(Another memory. He foretold this eventuality once in front of a crowded chip shop in London. "No, not you," he said, but what he meant was, "Yes, you. Especially you.")
He sent her away to keep her safe, and it's by her own design that she came back and she's in serious trouble with forces above and beyond her control. Again. From Satellite Five to Canary Wharf, there's a circularity to her life that's almost embarrassing.
Rose would feel properly idiotic, if she weren't already quite so occupied with falling through a dimensional void.
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"Where is she, Pete? Where's my daughter? She's not with useless old you, that much is obvious, so where the hell is she?!"
The cry is maddening, raw. Some part of Jackie Tyler already knows all is lost, but she wouldn't be Jackie Tyler in either universe if she didn't just scream the obvious. Whilst calling him useless. It'd almost be enough to make Pete smile if he weren't so gobsmacked.
"I had her--"
Pete Tyler has never failed at anything in his life. Even his most madcap ideas have been almost shockingly lucrative. He is rich, and white, and male, and it may not be exactly politically correct to say it, but he is bloody well entitled enough to everything going his own way. So why this failure, this immense, improbable failure?
"I had her," he says again, stunned. "Jacks, I had her, she was flying towards the wall and I caught her around the waist and I pressed the hopper and, and then--and. Then." He stops. His fingers flex, remembering the soft push of flesh underneath his hands, the compression of another body against his as he teleported between two impossible worlds. In between his atoms rearranging, he didn't quite notice Rose escaping his grasp, but she must have. She had to have, because where else--?
Mickey Smith lets out a breath. "The Doctor must've done something," he says, and his voice is a strange mix of relief and bitterness. "He always does, for Rose. She's fine, so long as she's got 'im."
Jackie is already on her knees, sobbing her heart out, and the sound is as wretched and familiar as it always was. Pete moves as if in a dream, the disbelief at the emptiness in his hands still eating away at him. Something isn't right. Something is very, very wrong.
He puts his arm around Jackie's shoulders and lets her cry out the worst of her pain. And as Mickey stares, unseeing, at the wall that's now closed up, Pete realizes his hopper has grown cold.
"The Doctor's done it. Sealed the breach, stopped the flow. And she's gone," Mickey says, quietly. "Not for ten seconds this time, and no hope to cross over again. She's really gone." There is a long stretch of suspended silence, and then he strikes out, hits the wall.
"Damn you," he whispers viciously, fist uncurling against the blank, bare barrier. "Damn you."
Jackie's head gives almost a nod against Pete's neck, nothing more definitive than a twitch and a hitch of her breath, but it's agreement enough. She is damning her daughter as well, breaking into pieces because her baby girl has chosen a road that will never find it's way back to her. There's pain in the gesture, and anger, and the worst sort of accusation.
"You didn't save her," the silence mocks. "You didn't save her and now she's gone." And yes, she is gone, there's no question of that. Only...how? More importantly...when? Rose was firmly in his arms the moment his hopper activated. And in the split second blink before he was back in his own world, Pete saw the devastation writ across the Doctor's face, so there's no possibility Rose was left behind there.
Pete knows he will never be enough for this Jacqueline Andrea Suzette Tyler, not in the way she would have been enough for him. Not with her daughter (the daughter he never acknowledged, never wanted to admit could be real) lost to her always. But if he could just figure out what exactly he's missing, maybe he could at least give his wife-but-not some answers.
Neither here nor there and all...the spaces...that are...left.
A strange song slips through him for one breathless instant, and everything sharpens into irrefutible focus.
Jackie continues to cry and Mickey continues to burn and Pete bows his head, because Pete is the only one who has realized that if Rose has fallen--
--blood of not his blood and the girl with the wounded eyes, a brave Rose Tyler of another world--
Then she had nowhere left to fall but into the dead space. Into Hell.
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Rose is disgusted, almost, with how gracelessly life as she knew it slipped away from her.
One blink. The slow-motion-stretch of her fingers prying away from the lever.
Two blinks. Her heart thick in her throat. Her body flying, flailing, falling.
Three blinks. The yawning pain blossoming across the Doctor's face. The soundless screams lost amidst the rushing air. Stunned resignation pounding away in her blood--like hollow drums, heralding her death.
(This is the last story I'll ever tell.)
Four blinks. The bewildering blur and catch of Pete Tyler's arms around her middle. The sudden realization, her fingers crooking and cramping as she struggled to push away from the father who once rejected even the possibility of her. The thundering, rampaging knowledge that she was being saved, but by the wrong man. The breathless, empty gasp as her eyes met the Doctor's across that mad whip of crackling energy.
And then five blinks, slamming through a temporal wall with all the force and inelegance of entire empires crumbling to the ground.
When she opened her eyes, she was gone. And that was that.
Rose forgot for a while, as everything came to dust. But she remembers now, and she knows this nothingness is a choice of her own making. A dream that was not a dream (the power of the Time Vortex singing through her, her fingers draping entire chronologies around her neck, across her wrists, wearing the years like so much arrogance unchecked) and a decision that reverberates through her veins even now.
Epiphanies, she discovers, are particularly lacking in grace.
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Blink and you miss it, life. The Doctor used to think that all the time, after the great war and fires across galaxies, when his heart was bitter and dark. The TARDIS thought it was the strangest thing. How can you miss anything when you've got a way to hurtle through space and reality, realms faster than even the flash of a human lash brushing the cheek?
But there are places even the TARDIS can't go. Moments that even the (last) Time Lord misses.
The girl. The extension of the TARDIS-heart. She is the Bad Wolf. She creates herself. Mines through probabilities and iterations and variation of a theme. Somewhere deep inside the power to gift life and steal death, the valiant child sweeps her fingers over the scattered cards of her many futures, and reshuffles the deck.
Life without love or love without a long enough life? Ah; that is the choice. Unless...
The TARDIS sees:
There are planes and paths winding before Rose Tyler, and the space around her is grey and insubstantial like smoke. A parallel world full of Zepplins in the sky, or a tragically short lifetime with the Doctor she loves, and Rose picks all the emptiness in between, instead.
The Bad Wolf makes her choice and lifts the letters, one by one. Scatters her words to make herself immortal in the only way she knows how. To lead herself--
--where? Where am I, Rose? Where are am I in you?
Time has lost her. Rose Tyler, the girl Time forgot.
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It's not as bad as all that, at first glance. A slate sky overhead and a concrete ground beneath her feet and a breeze that smells of flesh and grease. Skin and chips; yeah, the only thing she has to deal with in the beginning is her stomach roiling every other beat.
She's hungry. Famished, really. Hasn't eaten a bite for--well, no way to measure minutes or hours here, but she reckons it's been at least seven or eight sunsets and moonrises. The sun is white and the moon is white, and between all the monotones going on, Rose is almost tempted to eat her damn hand. Solve two problems, wouldn't it? The hunger and the color...blood smeared across her skin, startling red. She shakes her head when she think it; no use getting morbid, not yet.
There's nothing to do but walk. Her legs ache and her throat grows dry and still more roads reach out in front of her. She has no idea where she's going. Maybe she never did, and it was all just hubris, the human inclination to believe there is always a destination at the end of a journey.
The memories come easier out here, above (or below?) the influence of worldly concerns. What once was gauzy, cotton-candy ephmereal, insubstantial, is now clear as a bell ringing. It's more than the Doctor's soft soundtrack to the nightmares in her head, his voice telling her the story of how she killed the Emperor Dalek (all Daleks, in fact) and him. It's more than brushing her hand across the TARDIS console and feeling a responding tendril of acknowledgement.
Rose remembers what she did.
Tens of thousands of possibilities in front of her, all branching from the same root of the Doctor in his leather jacket, the Daleks defeated and his mouth cool, hungry against hers. Then one after another, a scrapbook of ways her life could go: the inevitable fire of regeneration (everything ends, everything ends) and new eyes gone hard and cold; a lifetime spent chasing the edge of his coat around corners, because it's easier to part with her than watch her die for him again; her death, over and over again; a new companion and she's left at home to waste away; she and the Doctor kissing, pressed against the support strut of the TARDIS, hands everywhere and finally no more space left between them.
There were many more possibilities, both bad and worse and better (making love on the pleasure planet Eros, dancing a waltz across the Blimlox Fletch galaxy) but they all--without fail, with little deviation--led to the one future that she couldn't accept. The future that was going to happen, the future that was destined to become. Rose Tyler in that room, hands wound around those magnaclamps, and the void wreaking havoc around her.
The time vortex whispered to her, "Rose. Rose, you are infinite only in this moment. You cannot choose a fate that is not your own." Rose, it said, you will lose him. But Rose was stubborn. Not now, she said, not now, maybe not not-ever, but not now. Please.
Tens of thousands of possibilites and Rose had the most impossible task. Her fingers had to slip from the lever, the void had to close. But charged with the ability to lead herself to whichever outcome she wished, Rose made a choice. She saw a life in another London, zepplins and her Dad and Mickey and loneliness but a baby and her mum and a life all the same. A life. But no Doctor.
And she cried out, with all the violence of the stars and suns and space within her, No. Anything but that life, any world but that world.
Rose closes her eyes and feels the road beneath her, the phantom turn of a phantom ground. She died in battle after all, then. In this battle. She feels a detached respect for the Rose of yesteryear, who loved the Doctor so much she would give up life altogether for the sake of a life not spent with him anymore. She feels a detached respect for the sort of love that burned (burns, will always burn) inside her.
She feels also a detached respect for the universe, who dumped her here because it had just that sort of sense of humor. Any world but that world, indeed.
Rose would laugh, or perhaps cry, but she's still far too hungry.
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The superphone is silent in her hand. No signal; no surprise. No area code, after all.
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The TARDIS pumped its blood through Rose's veins once. Gold spilling out of every breath, every blink. She walked with the weight of clocks ticking their way through her, and she spun the dials back and forth by her whim.
Rose was proud. Rose was ignorant. Rose twirled a timestream around her finger and said, "I create myself and I will not let myself be undone." She wanted forever, and the only place forever existed was here. Is here. Will be here. Infinite roads worn down by her weary steps. There is no Bad Wolf to lead her back home. She is the Bad Wolf and this place is her place, now.
Sometimes she thinks she hears millions of Daleks scream. Sometimes she knows she sees half-converted Cyberpeople stagger to and fro. And sometimes, leaning against some barren tree, munching a black apple, silver juices running down his grey face, the Doctor watches her walk the slow path alone.
Professor freaking Dumbledore had it right, didn't he?
There really are some fates worse than death.
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Torchwood One takes a hit.
It's no secret. Cybermen and mass human extermination is not exactly a glowing recommendation for the organization. The Queen, having been held hostage by homocidal robots, is extremely cross. For some time, funding is suspended for the once thriving project. The city building houses ghosts in actuality this time, spirits wandering the halls in whispers and wind. The workers sent to clean up the grounds spend days shivering for no real reason, and one man has to be sent home when he finds a half-converted Cyberperson quietly, painfully dying in the cellar.
The worst part is the wall.
It's nothing special at first glance. Just an expansive white spread, the ground beneath it littered with papers and debris. This is where a time void sealed shut, the gossips around Torchwood Ops whisper. This is where the legendary Doctor opened up a rip between universes and sent the Daleks and Cybermen to their deaths.
There is a scuff mark on the ground. Something like trainers. And a handprint of residual energy pressed to the blank surface of the wall.
A struggle took place here, the agents say. They clean the scuff marks and map the energy. And their faces are grim, because everything about this is wrong.
Someone died here, but there's no body. Something died here, but there's no grave. They don't know that there will never be either.
Torchwood boxes Canary Wharf up, and seals it tight. Lets the memories fester and the emptiness expand, till every centimetre is filled with only memories of the blood and guts spilled on Doomsday.
The wall still stands as the days grow cold.
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The saddest part, Rose decides, is that the Doctor will never know.
Poor Time-Lord. Last of his kind, and all alone, and Rose thought she could save him from that loneliness, didn't she? Wanted to save him, at any rate.
She knows he will not think to save her, because he will think she is already safe. He will think she is in another universe, and he will think it's for the best. He won't think to say goodbye.
(It makes her throat ache, how scared she was that he'd send her away without even saying goodbye. And now she's gone more finally than he could ever have left her at all--)
He will look at the wall separating them and he will say, shadows in his voice and sadness in his eyes: "Good. She'll live a longer, fuller life, at any rate." And then he'll ho-hum his way through time and space, picking up people from their listless lives and adding her to the chamber of echoes lining his expansive memory. She'll be a memory to him, at best. A ghost to him, at worst. He'll never know where she is. Never know to find her.
Never know to rescue her, and so she must rescue herself.
She hates that she still hopes, even as ashes fill her mouth and void stretches on.
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One step. Rose is gone. Another step. Rose is gone. A hand to the wall. Rose is gone.
The Doctor hopes this isn't how the rest of his steps are going to go, eons and eons stretching before him, the refrain haunting his every heel-to-toe.
Landing on some planet--Rose is gone--taking in the sights--Rose is gone--righting wrongs so worlds aren't blown up nor tyrannical governments left untoppled--
--Rose is gone and the worst part is, he never told her--
Given time, one may say, he might forget her. There may be no refrain. No voice haunting the corners of his TARDIS, his hearts. But he already has time, and that's the problem. He has all the time in the world, and he's never been able to forget before.
But he supposes he ought to try. Rose is gone, but she is safe, and that is all that matters. All that's ever mattered.
The Doctor lets his hand fall to his side. He turns. And he walks away.
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Humans are so stupid sometimes.
This is not the first time Rose has ever thought that thought. But it is the first time she has had irrevocable proof.
(The Doctor would be so proud. Or horrified. She can't quite guess which, and the indecision unsettles her because she thought she knew him so well, and she's starting to suspect what she actually knew is only what she wanted to know. Or what he wanted her to know. Which in the end, no matter how it's cut, is nothing. Too many silences, too many walls, and too many loose ends left behind as he traveled from time to time, planet to planet. Though--
Loose ends, yeah. She knows something about that, now doesn't she? Two words on the playground, on the swings, on everything.)
Heaven and Hell. God and Satan. The all-mighty and the destroyer of all things. Angels and demons, saints and monsters. Light and dark, good and evil, even all the grey stuff in the middle. (War and peace, the rolling, storming grief in bright blue eyes and the battle-cry in bittersweet brown.)
None of it exists, not really. And come to think of it, neither does she.
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The memorial is startlingly, endearingly human.
Rose's mate Shireen makes a trembly speech about chips and third form and Saturday nights looking at the stars, and how Rose is probably watching them all with a smile right now. Auntie Deb lights a candle and plays My Heart Will Go On and everyone weeps a lot. Then Howard, sweet old Howard, gives a great belch and tells everyone to stop being giant gits and start a party, 'cause no friend of Jackie and Rose Tyler is gonna sit around on their bum and feel sorry for themselves.
Someone takes the beer bottle from Howard's hand, but by then, everyone's laughing too hard to protest.
It's exactly what Jackie would have approved of. Rose, too, probably, but then, she was never the type to go gently into the night. Captain Jack Harkness ducks behind a tree, breathing heavily. Of all places, he thought he'd find the Doctor here. Here, where the girl everyone could see he loved, was laid to rest in the hearts and minds of her friends, family. Here, where for once, he wouldn't be alone. But that's the Doctor all over, isn't it? Leaving loved ones behind when the pain of it gets to be too much. Jack remembers a bright, happy smile and blazing blond hair, and the ache in his ever-beating heart makes him understand, just a little.
As the party winds down and with it, stories of the life Rose Tyler and Jackie Tyler lived, Jack wishes he could tell them all of the fantastic tales, the stories behind the stories. The things that made Rose who she was. For now, he supposes, it's up to him to preserve that memory, and maybe when he finds the Doctor again, he'll be able to share the recollections again. He stands straight, salutes. Says a sorrowful, simple goodbye in the click of his heels.
Galaxies away, the Doctor orbits a supernova and looks into nothingness, a transmission unrecieved and a thorn of horrified suspicion cutting into his thoughts.
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(Hell is a contruct of the mind. Rose knows this; she's far from a theological genius, but she knows that the idea of Hell is infinitely more terrifying than any singular world or plane or Beast that could exist. There's no brimstone and flame, raging with damning light, illuminating desires and weakness and fear. Humans manage that well enough on their own, revealing and revelling in their failings just to watch themselves burn. Falling on their own swords. Hoisted on their own pitards, as the Doctor would say.)
Rose laughs, and the void exists.
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Part Two
Author: biggrstaffbunch
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be." It occurs to Rose that Hell is not at all like one would think. [Doomsday AU]
A/N: Part 1 of Into the Howling trilogy. This is for goldy_dollar for being all-around awesome and thank you so much to sandwch_zombie for the beta!
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It's strange what a person will remember in when they're busy dying. Just ask Rose.
(And bloody Christ, one day she hopes that won't be the go-to phrase whenever something vaguely horrifying, completely strange, or remotely otherworldly occurs. "Cat in a nun's wimple? Terrible! Just ask Rose.")
What she calls to mind's eye now is this:
A memory of that time after Sarah Jane and eighteenth-century France, when weighty realizations began to creep under overly bright smiles and in between fingers desperately intertwined. There was a strange quiet that surrounded the TARDIS in those days because stripped of their defenses, the Doctor and Rose skirted truths far more closely than they ever did in the light of the outside world.
One day, standing in front of the central column, the green glow of the TARDIS shrouding his face in appropriately alien light, the Doctor said:
"I've died nine times before, you know. This is my tenth body."
Wiggled his fingers and grinned, silliness and a secret, sullen spite, a message clear in the dark of his gaze. There was life before you, Rose Tyler, and there will be life after you.
Rose let it pass, then. Because despite the Doctor's attempts at distance, she's always known that whatever he turned into at Time War's end, it belongs to her in ways that remain unquantifiable. Regardless of before or what will happen after, she possesses pieces of who he was at that exact point of time, entire swaths of the figure he became once the fires of Gallifrey stopped burning. His pain, his isolation, his guilt, his helpless, hapless love, it's all intrinsically her own because he gave them to her like gifts, until one day he didn't even laugh when she promised him forever.
(Oh, there are other things, of course. The curve of his lips, the slope of his nose, the varying flares of his varying ears. The cells that made up and make up the Doctor and his irrepressible, irreversible self. All of that belongs to Rose, too, nestled in the map of her brain, catalogued in every breath that she draws.)
Right at this moment, though, it is the irony of the Doctor's proclamation that is getting to Rose. After all, he's had ten regenerations, ten lives lived over a span of almost nine centuries, and Rose hasn't even finished her twentieth year before the first and last life she'll ever get is at its end.
(Another memory. He foretold this eventuality once in front of a crowded chip shop in London. "No, not you," he said, but what he meant was, "Yes, you. Especially you.")
He sent her away to keep her safe, and it's by her own design that she came back and she's in serious trouble with forces above and beyond her control. Again. From Satellite Five to Canary Wharf, there's a circularity to her life that's almost embarrassing.
Rose would feel properly idiotic, if she weren't already quite so occupied with falling through a dimensional void.
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"Where is she, Pete? Where's my daughter? She's not with useless old you, that much is obvious, so where the hell is she?!"
The cry is maddening, raw. Some part of Jackie Tyler already knows all is lost, but she wouldn't be Jackie Tyler in either universe if she didn't just scream the obvious. Whilst calling him useless. It'd almost be enough to make Pete smile if he weren't so gobsmacked.
"I had her--"
Pete Tyler has never failed at anything in his life. Even his most madcap ideas have been almost shockingly lucrative. He is rich, and white, and male, and it may not be exactly politically correct to say it, but he is bloody well entitled enough to everything going his own way. So why this failure, this immense, improbable failure?
"I had her," he says again, stunned. "Jacks, I had her, she was flying towards the wall and I caught her around the waist and I pressed the hopper and, and then--and. Then." He stops. His fingers flex, remembering the soft push of flesh underneath his hands, the compression of another body against his as he teleported between two impossible worlds. In between his atoms rearranging, he didn't quite notice Rose escaping his grasp, but she must have. She had to have, because where else--?
Mickey Smith lets out a breath. "The Doctor must've done something," he says, and his voice is a strange mix of relief and bitterness. "He always does, for Rose. She's fine, so long as she's got 'im."
Jackie is already on her knees, sobbing her heart out, and the sound is as wretched and familiar as it always was. Pete moves as if in a dream, the disbelief at the emptiness in his hands still eating away at him. Something isn't right. Something is very, very wrong.
He puts his arm around Jackie's shoulders and lets her cry out the worst of her pain. And as Mickey stares, unseeing, at the wall that's now closed up, Pete realizes his hopper has grown cold.
"The Doctor's done it. Sealed the breach, stopped the flow. And she's gone," Mickey says, quietly. "Not for ten seconds this time, and no hope to cross over again. She's really gone." There is a long stretch of suspended silence, and then he strikes out, hits the wall.
"Damn you," he whispers viciously, fist uncurling against the blank, bare barrier. "Damn you."
Jackie's head gives almost a nod against Pete's neck, nothing more definitive than a twitch and a hitch of her breath, but it's agreement enough. She is damning her daughter as well, breaking into pieces because her baby girl has chosen a road that will never find it's way back to her. There's pain in the gesture, and anger, and the worst sort of accusation.
"You didn't save her," the silence mocks. "You didn't save her and now she's gone." And yes, she is gone, there's no question of that. Only...how? More importantly...when? Rose was firmly in his arms the moment his hopper activated. And in the split second blink before he was back in his own world, Pete saw the devastation writ across the Doctor's face, so there's no possibility Rose was left behind there.
Pete knows he will never be enough for this Jacqueline Andrea Suzette Tyler, not in the way she would have been enough for him. Not with her daughter (the daughter he never acknowledged, never wanted to admit could be real) lost to her always. But if he could just figure out what exactly he's missing, maybe he could at least give his wife-but-not some answers.
Neither here nor there and all...the spaces...that are...left.
A strange song slips through him for one breathless instant, and everything sharpens into irrefutible focus.
Jackie continues to cry and Mickey continues to burn and Pete bows his head, because Pete is the only one who has realized that if Rose has fallen--
--blood of not his blood and the girl with the wounded eyes, a brave Rose Tyler of another world--
Then she had nowhere left to fall but into the dead space. Into Hell.
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Rose is disgusted, almost, with how gracelessly life as she knew it slipped away from her.
One blink. The slow-motion-stretch of her fingers prying away from the lever.
Two blinks. Her heart thick in her throat. Her body flying, flailing, falling.
Three blinks. The yawning pain blossoming across the Doctor's face. The soundless screams lost amidst the rushing air. Stunned resignation pounding away in her blood--like hollow drums, heralding her death.
(This is the last story I'll ever tell.)
Four blinks. The bewildering blur and catch of Pete Tyler's arms around her middle. The sudden realization, her fingers crooking and cramping as she struggled to push away from the father who once rejected even the possibility of her. The thundering, rampaging knowledge that she was being saved, but by the wrong man. The breathless, empty gasp as her eyes met the Doctor's across that mad whip of crackling energy.
And then five blinks, slamming through a temporal wall with all the force and inelegance of entire empires crumbling to the ground.
When she opened her eyes, she was gone. And that was that.
Rose forgot for a while, as everything came to dust. But she remembers now, and she knows this nothingness is a choice of her own making. A dream that was not a dream (the power of the Time Vortex singing through her, her fingers draping entire chronologies around her neck, across her wrists, wearing the years like so much arrogance unchecked) and a decision that reverberates through her veins even now.
Epiphanies, she discovers, are particularly lacking in grace.
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Blink and you miss it, life. The Doctor used to think that all the time, after the great war and fires across galaxies, when his heart was bitter and dark. The TARDIS thought it was the strangest thing. How can you miss anything when you've got a way to hurtle through space and reality, realms faster than even the flash of a human lash brushing the cheek?
But there are places even the TARDIS can't go. Moments that even the (last) Time Lord misses.
The girl. The extension of the TARDIS-heart. She is the Bad Wolf. She creates herself. Mines through probabilities and iterations and variation of a theme. Somewhere deep inside the power to gift life and steal death, the valiant child sweeps her fingers over the scattered cards of her many futures, and reshuffles the deck.
Life without love or love without a long enough life? Ah; that is the choice. Unless...
The TARDIS sees:
There are planes and paths winding before Rose Tyler, and the space around her is grey and insubstantial like smoke. A parallel world full of Zepplins in the sky, or a tragically short lifetime with the Doctor she loves, and Rose picks all the emptiness in between, instead.
The Bad Wolf makes her choice and lifts the letters, one by one. Scatters her words to make herself immortal in the only way she knows how. To lead herself--
--where? Where am I, Rose? Where are am I in you?
Time has lost her. Rose Tyler, the girl Time forgot.
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It's not as bad as all that, at first glance. A slate sky overhead and a concrete ground beneath her feet and a breeze that smells of flesh and grease. Skin and chips; yeah, the only thing she has to deal with in the beginning is her stomach roiling every other beat.
She's hungry. Famished, really. Hasn't eaten a bite for--well, no way to measure minutes or hours here, but she reckons it's been at least seven or eight sunsets and moonrises. The sun is white and the moon is white, and between all the monotones going on, Rose is almost tempted to eat her damn hand. Solve two problems, wouldn't it? The hunger and the color...blood smeared across her skin, startling red. She shakes her head when she think it; no use getting morbid, not yet.
There's nothing to do but walk. Her legs ache and her throat grows dry and still more roads reach out in front of her. She has no idea where she's going. Maybe she never did, and it was all just hubris, the human inclination to believe there is always a destination at the end of a journey.
The memories come easier out here, above (or below?) the influence of worldly concerns. What once was gauzy, cotton-candy ephmereal, insubstantial, is now clear as a bell ringing. It's more than the Doctor's soft soundtrack to the nightmares in her head, his voice telling her the story of how she killed the Emperor Dalek (all Daleks, in fact) and him. It's more than brushing her hand across the TARDIS console and feeling a responding tendril of acknowledgement.
Rose remembers what she did.
Tens of thousands of possibilities in front of her, all branching from the same root of the Doctor in his leather jacket, the Daleks defeated and his mouth cool, hungry against hers. Then one after another, a scrapbook of ways her life could go: the inevitable fire of regeneration (everything ends, everything ends) and new eyes gone hard and cold; a lifetime spent chasing the edge of his coat around corners, because it's easier to part with her than watch her die for him again; her death, over and over again; a new companion and she's left at home to waste away; she and the Doctor kissing, pressed against the support strut of the TARDIS, hands everywhere and finally no more space left between them.
There were many more possibilities, both bad and worse and better (making love on the pleasure planet Eros, dancing a waltz across the Blimlox Fletch galaxy) but they all--without fail, with little deviation--led to the one future that she couldn't accept. The future that was going to happen, the future that was destined to become. Rose Tyler in that room, hands wound around those magnaclamps, and the void wreaking havoc around her.
The time vortex whispered to her, "Rose. Rose, you are infinite only in this moment. You cannot choose a fate that is not your own." Rose, it said, you will lose him. But Rose was stubborn. Not now, she said, not now, maybe not not-ever, but not now. Please.
Tens of thousands of possibilites and Rose had the most impossible task. Her fingers had to slip from the lever, the void had to close. But charged with the ability to lead herself to whichever outcome she wished, Rose made a choice. She saw a life in another London, zepplins and her Dad and Mickey and loneliness but a baby and her mum and a life all the same. A life. But no Doctor.
And she cried out, with all the violence of the stars and suns and space within her, No. Anything but that life, any world but that world.
Rose closes her eyes and feels the road beneath her, the phantom turn of a phantom ground. She died in battle after all, then. In this battle. She feels a detached respect for the Rose of yesteryear, who loved the Doctor so much she would give up life altogether for the sake of a life not spent with him anymore. She feels a detached respect for the sort of love that burned (burns, will always burn) inside her.
She feels also a detached respect for the universe, who dumped her here because it had just that sort of sense of humor. Any world but that world, indeed.
Rose would laugh, or perhaps cry, but she's still far too hungry.
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The superphone is silent in her hand. No signal; no surprise. No area code, after all.
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The TARDIS pumped its blood through Rose's veins once. Gold spilling out of every breath, every blink. She walked with the weight of clocks ticking their way through her, and she spun the dials back and forth by her whim.
Rose was proud. Rose was ignorant. Rose twirled a timestream around her finger and said, "I create myself and I will not let myself be undone." She wanted forever, and the only place forever existed was here. Is here. Will be here. Infinite roads worn down by her weary steps. There is no Bad Wolf to lead her back home. She is the Bad Wolf and this place is her place, now.
Sometimes she thinks she hears millions of Daleks scream. Sometimes she knows she sees half-converted Cyberpeople stagger to and fro. And sometimes, leaning against some barren tree, munching a black apple, silver juices running down his grey face, the Doctor watches her walk the slow path alone.
Professor freaking Dumbledore had it right, didn't he?
There really are some fates worse than death.
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Torchwood One takes a hit.
It's no secret. Cybermen and mass human extermination is not exactly a glowing recommendation for the organization. The Queen, having been held hostage by homocidal robots, is extremely cross. For some time, funding is suspended for the once thriving project. The city building houses ghosts in actuality this time, spirits wandering the halls in whispers and wind. The workers sent to clean up the grounds spend days shivering for no real reason, and one man has to be sent home when he finds a half-converted Cyberperson quietly, painfully dying in the cellar.
The worst part is the wall.
It's nothing special at first glance. Just an expansive white spread, the ground beneath it littered with papers and debris. This is where a time void sealed shut, the gossips around Torchwood Ops whisper. This is where the legendary Doctor opened up a rip between universes and sent the Daleks and Cybermen to their deaths.
There is a scuff mark on the ground. Something like trainers. And a handprint of residual energy pressed to the blank surface of the wall.
A struggle took place here, the agents say. They clean the scuff marks and map the energy. And their faces are grim, because everything about this is wrong.
Someone died here, but there's no body. Something died here, but there's no grave. They don't know that there will never be either.
Torchwood boxes Canary Wharf up, and seals it tight. Lets the memories fester and the emptiness expand, till every centimetre is filled with only memories of the blood and guts spilled on Doomsday.
The wall still stands as the days grow cold.
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The saddest part, Rose decides, is that the Doctor will never know.
Poor Time-Lord. Last of his kind, and all alone, and Rose thought she could save him from that loneliness, didn't she? Wanted to save him, at any rate.
She knows he will not think to save her, because he will think she is already safe. He will think she is in another universe, and he will think it's for the best. He won't think to say goodbye.
(It makes her throat ache, how scared she was that he'd send her away without even saying goodbye. And now she's gone more finally than he could ever have left her at all--)
He will look at the wall separating them and he will say, shadows in his voice and sadness in his eyes: "Good. She'll live a longer, fuller life, at any rate." And then he'll ho-hum his way through time and space, picking up people from their listless lives and adding her to the chamber of echoes lining his expansive memory. She'll be a memory to him, at best. A ghost to him, at worst. He'll never know where she is. Never know to find her.
Never know to rescue her, and so she must rescue herself.
She hates that she still hopes, even as ashes fill her mouth and void stretches on.
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One step. Rose is gone. Another step. Rose is gone. A hand to the wall. Rose is gone.
The Doctor hopes this isn't how the rest of his steps are going to go, eons and eons stretching before him, the refrain haunting his every heel-to-toe.
Landing on some planet--Rose is gone--taking in the sights--Rose is gone--righting wrongs so worlds aren't blown up nor tyrannical governments left untoppled--
--Rose is gone and the worst part is, he never told her--
Given time, one may say, he might forget her. There may be no refrain. No voice haunting the corners of his TARDIS, his hearts. But he already has time, and that's the problem. He has all the time in the world, and he's never been able to forget before.
But he supposes he ought to try. Rose is gone, but she is safe, and that is all that matters. All that's ever mattered.
The Doctor lets his hand fall to his side. He turns. And he walks away.
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Humans are so stupid sometimes.
This is not the first time Rose has ever thought that thought. But it is the first time she has had irrevocable proof.
(The Doctor would be so proud. Or horrified. She can't quite guess which, and the indecision unsettles her because she thought she knew him so well, and she's starting to suspect what she actually knew is only what she wanted to know. Or what he wanted her to know. Which in the end, no matter how it's cut, is nothing. Too many silences, too many walls, and too many loose ends left behind as he traveled from time to time, planet to planet. Though--
Loose ends, yeah. She knows something about that, now doesn't she? Two words on the playground, on the swings, on everything.)
Heaven and Hell. God and Satan. The all-mighty and the destroyer of all things. Angels and demons, saints and monsters. Light and dark, good and evil, even all the grey stuff in the middle. (War and peace, the rolling, storming grief in bright blue eyes and the battle-cry in bittersweet brown.)
None of it exists, not really. And come to think of it, neither does she.
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The memorial is startlingly, endearingly human.
Rose's mate Shireen makes a trembly speech about chips and third form and Saturday nights looking at the stars, and how Rose is probably watching them all with a smile right now. Auntie Deb lights a candle and plays My Heart Will Go On and everyone weeps a lot. Then Howard, sweet old Howard, gives a great belch and tells everyone to stop being giant gits and start a party, 'cause no friend of Jackie and Rose Tyler is gonna sit around on their bum and feel sorry for themselves.
Someone takes the beer bottle from Howard's hand, but by then, everyone's laughing too hard to protest.
It's exactly what Jackie would have approved of. Rose, too, probably, but then, she was never the type to go gently into the night. Captain Jack Harkness ducks behind a tree, breathing heavily. Of all places, he thought he'd find the Doctor here. Here, where the girl everyone could see he loved, was laid to rest in the hearts and minds of her friends, family. Here, where for once, he wouldn't be alone. But that's the Doctor all over, isn't it? Leaving loved ones behind when the pain of it gets to be too much. Jack remembers a bright, happy smile and blazing blond hair, and the ache in his ever-beating heart makes him understand, just a little.
As the party winds down and with it, stories of the life Rose Tyler and Jackie Tyler lived, Jack wishes he could tell them all of the fantastic tales, the stories behind the stories. The things that made Rose who she was. For now, he supposes, it's up to him to preserve that memory, and maybe when he finds the Doctor again, he'll be able to share the recollections again. He stands straight, salutes. Says a sorrowful, simple goodbye in the click of his heels.
Galaxies away, the Doctor orbits a supernova and looks into nothingness, a transmission unrecieved and a thorn of horrified suspicion cutting into his thoughts.
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(Hell is a contruct of the mind. Rose knows this; she's far from a theological genius, but she knows that the idea of Hell is infinitely more terrifying than any singular world or plane or Beast that could exist. There's no brimstone and flame, raging with damning light, illuminating desires and weakness and fear. Humans manage that well enough on their own, revealing and revelling in their failings just to watch themselves burn. Falling on their own swords. Hoisted on their own pitards, as the Doctor would say.)
Rose laughs, and the void exists.
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Part Two