DR WHO FIC: No Longer Rose [2/4]
Been awhile since I've been around, yeah? Sucked up in work, I am. But I'm trying to come back to all my friends here. I miss readin' the stories you put up and all :)
Title: No Longer Rose
Author: charlottetrips
Genre: drama, angst
Characters: Ten, Rose
Summary: You'll keep on changing. And in forty years time, fifty, there'll be this woman - this strange woman walking through the marketplace on some planet a billion miles from Earth. She's not Rose Tyler. Not anymore. She's not even human...
1.
2.
Long ago, a broken-hearted woman had left an unnamed planet alone and numb with grief. She'd taken the ship she'd shared with the love of her life and thrown it into the Time Vortex, not caring where or when she was going. She'd spent hours, days, months-she didn't give a damn-hiding from the rest of the universe.
It wasn't until she'd finally heard the song of her TARDIS, the sweet melody wending its way through the wall of grief, that she finally felt a measure of solace in her hearts. She missed him too, this ship that was both new and old. The song resonated in the grief-stricken woman and she tentatively reached out to the ship and found the secret to her immortality.
The TARDIS was the reason Rose still existed. She'd forgotten the Bad Wolf. A young human girl had been turned into a goddess who'd held the whole of existence in the palm of her hand for a moment out of time. She'd destroyed a whole species and saved the greatest man in the universe. She couldn't have been "just human" after that. No, it seemed that there had been a bit of Time Lord left. And the TARDIS had made sure of that.
Though she had traveled with the Doctor, all three incarnations of him, she hadn't really known much about his people. It wasn't that he'd not wanted to tell her, but more that they had so much more to do and say, even more so when it had been just her and her Doctor, who only had the one life to live.
When they'd been grounded while they waited for their TARDIS to grow, he'd wanted to explore parallel Earth. Though Rose had lived there for several years herself, she hadn't actually gone further than the People's Republic and so had jumped at the chance to be traveling again, especially with him. Then the TARDIS had fully grown and they'd taken to the skies once more, having adventures that boggled the human mind. It had been the Doctor in the TARDIS with Rose Tyler, as it should be.
And now it was just the TARDIS and Rose-who wasn't Rose anymore.
Oh how her hearts ached, how her soul cried out for its missing half. The TARDIS understood and wept with her, shared her pain. The young ship had been trying to impart this to Rose in those dark days of grief and sorrow but Rose had been too wrapped up in counting the pieces of her hearts to be aware of it. The music had finally reached Rose as she lay on the jump seat of the console room. She wasn't sure what had changed that she was finally willing to listen, but she was and when she heard the melodic telepathic communication, the tears she hadn't wept since she last saw his body fell. And the TARDIS embraced her.
This connection she formed with the TARDIS was unlike anything she had ever experienced. It wasn't like having someone else in her mind but more that the awareness of herself and the universe around her had expanded exponentially. She'd thought in the past, when she'd come across the Doctor standing in a random room with a faraway look in his eyes, that he'd gotten lost in one of the many tangents his thoughts often tripped on. But now being able to speak with the TARDIS herself, experience the ebb and flow of time and space, coming close to infinity and zero all at once, she understood the look that had been on her love's face. It had been one of peace.
Rose knew she'd soothed his spirit, that she'd completed him, but the inner peace one got communing with the TARDIS was different. It engendered a oneness with the surrounding planets and civilizations, individual lives and overall societies, that Rose had only read about in books of spiritual philosophies and had never dreamed of experiencing in actuality.
She learned the history of the Time Lords, gained such an understanding of the workings and threads of Time that she finally comprehended what the Doctor had meant when he'd held her hand outside the Powell estate, in their first days together and told her, I can feel it...the turn of the earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour. The entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. And I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world.
It was that multiplied by billions of stars and planes of existence.
She also saw now why the Doctor was always on the move. Yes, it was in part a motion of running away, of not facing the consequences, but a large part was because of this feeling, this love that one couldn't help but have for the universe at large once one had experienced the touch of stars dying and being born, of civilizations rising and falling, of a single life starting and ending.
She laid her hands on the console and looked up at the glowing center, letting the TARDIS' song trill through her mind and spirit.
3.