Disintegration 2/6?
Story: Disintegration
Author: WMR
Characters: Ten, Rose, Jackie Tyler, more to come
Rated: PG (may increase)
Spoilers: All the way to Age of Steel
Summary: “You know this is goodbye, right? No visits. I don’t do that. If you leave now, Rose, this is it.”
With very many thanks to my wonderful BR,
dark_aegis
Chapter 1: Selfish
Chapter 2: Letting Go
They all left. Every one of them.
The curse of the Time Lords, he’d once told Rose. To be alone.
He’d known, despite his promise to her not to leave her behind, that she’d leave him some day. He just hadn’t expected it to be so soon.
He’d been torn, when she’d told him what she wanted. Should he try to talk her out of it? Or should he just respect her decision, regardless of how much it hurt, and let her go?
Sometimes, Rose was very easy to read. But at other times, like earlier, she wasn’t transparent at all. Well, other than clearly being miserable, but this had to have been a hard decision for her. He’d only hope that she was as upset about leaving him as he was about her going. Had she wanted him to persuade her to stay? Had she been expecting some sort of declaration from him, maybe about how much she meant to him?
Though she shouldn’t have needed that. She knew how he felt about her. There was no way in the universe that she couldn’t know. Even Mickey had said it, right there in front of the two of them. And Jake.
They hadn’t needed words, him and Rose. Actions, gestures, looks, even silence were all far more significant. The words had never needed to be said, with either of the regenerations she’d known.
So that couldn’t have been it.
Had she wanted him to talk her out of leaving? He’d thought not, watching her. At the same time, he’d suspected that it wouldn’t have taken much to get her to change her mind. But what had been clear was that she hadn’t wanted to. And he respected that. What she wanted would always be important to him.
So, even though it’d almost killed him, he’d let her go.
And now he was alone. Again.
Well, maybe it was time he got used to it. For a while, anyway.
***
In the end, she was wrong.
Her mum didn’t need her. Not really.
Oh, she was very happy to see her back. Very surprised, but relieved too, to hear that she’d left the Doctor. Not that she still disliked the Doctor; actually, to Rose’s surprise, she and the new Doctor had ended up getting on pretty well. They’d seemed to understand each other. But she was overjoyed that Rose was no longer risking life and limb on distant planets and the furthest reaches of the past or future.
But what she’d missed over the past year was that her mum had a life. A life that didn’t include her, not in the way she’d expected.
Her mum had always had a life of her own, of course. But then, before she’d left to travel the universe with the Doctor, so had she. And, for her mum, of course, that’d been two years ago.
It was two years ago for her friends, too. They’d moved on, done different things with their lives, got jobs - careers, in some cases - started and finished relationships, even got married in some cases. They’d made new friends. Developed new interests. In some cases, there was nothing left to the friendship any more.
She hadn’t noticed before how much everyone had changed. But then, coming home for visits of a few days at a time - if that - was very different from coming home permanently. Before, she ran in and out of their lives, staying around for a few hours, leaving opportunity only for short conversations. And, since she never told any of them what she was really doing and who with, the conversations had been superficial and full of lies.
Au-pairing. Backpacking around the world. Working her way through continents. That was the story her mum had started with and she’d continued. It had been easy enough to sustain on short visits; she hadn’t found it that hard to adapt some of her experiences, to take out any of the alien or fantastical details, and to pretend they’d taken place in Africa or South America instead of Justicia or 1940s London or the far-flung future.
Now, it was harder. Now, she was expected to have souvenirs of places she’d visited. Detailed stories of where she’d been and what she’d done. Some of her friends’ new friends had even been to one or two of the places she was supposed to have visited. To stop her lies being exposed, she started deflecting conversation whenever she was asked about her travels. That inadvertently gave the impression that she’d got airs and wasn’t interested in talking to her friends any more.
The real problem was that they’d all changed. And beyond recognition.
***
“ ‘S about time you got a job, Rose.”
She’d been home two weeks when her mum glared at her across the breakfast-table one morning. “Can’t expect me to keep you indefinitely, can you? Got to start livin’ in the real world again, now you’re not runnin’ off to strange places with him any more.”
Her mum was right. And that was something she’d been putting off.
She needed to start the rest of her life. For the last two weeks, she’d been living in a kind of limbo. As if she’d been pretending that this was just temporary.
She’d been behaving as if this was just like any other visit home; just a little longer than most. But, once she started looking for a job, she’d no longer be able to kid herself that this was just temporary; that any day now the TARDIS would be back and she and the Doctor would be off universe-hopping again. This was it. She was home for good.
And it’d been her own choice. Her decision. Because she’d decided that the time was right. The fact that she’d started regretting it even before she’d walked through the TARDIS door for the last time was irrelevant.
“Yeah.” She sighed, but met her mum’s gaze. “I’ll go down the job-centre today.”
“Yeah, an’ make sure you sign on, too,” her mum said, in a tone that sounded far too much like a nag. “Not that they’ll give you any money yet. Probably make you wait six weeks or something cause you haven’t been signing on. ‘S not like you got any proof that you’ve been working these last two years.”
Yeah, and it wasn’t as if she could put Saving the universe with the last Time Lord on her CV, either.
The other problem was that she had no idea what she wanted to do. Yeah, she could get another job in a shop. But even before Henrik’s had blown up and she’d met the Doctor she’d already known that wasn’t what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.
She’d been able to put off making any decisions about that while she was with the Doctor. But the dream was over now. She’d woken up. And the rest of her life was staring her in the face.
***
So she went through the motions of living. Signed on. Went down the job-centre daily. Applied for a few jobs. Got a job working in a greasy-spoon café - those few days she’d spent as a dinner-lady in Deffry Vale High School had come in handy, after all, despite her complaints.
Missed Mickey.
And, of course, she missed the Doctor.
She dreamed about both of them every night. Mickey was angry and hurt, accusing her of leaving him, treating him like dirt, taking him for granted. Of trying to have it all - the Doctor most of the time, but Mickey whenever the Doctor wasn’t around. She saw herself telling him that there was nothing at home for her any more. Not even him.
She saw him telling her that there was nothing at home for him any more. That he didn’t need her. Didn’t want her.
She saw herself standing by the side of the road, tears streaming down her cheeks, while Mickey walked away and didn’t look back.
She saw the Doctor, in both his forms, holding out his hand to her. Asking her to come with him. Promising to show her wonders beyond her imagination. In her dreams, she saw him kiss her, cradle her in his arms, then lower her to the floor. Why, she didn’t know, because the dream always faded at that point.
She saw him shouting at her, calling her a stupid ape. She saw him tell her that she’d wither and die and she couldn’t expect him to have to watch that happen. She saw him die right in front of her. And she saw him reborn. She saw him run away from her and to another woman. She saw him kiss another woman, and mourn her death. She saw him broken, grief-stricken, believing that she was dead. And she saw him lie to her, send her away, for her own good.
She saw him standing in the TARDIS, expression solemn, saying goodbye to her. Heard him tell her that this was for ever, that she’d never see him again. And she saw him turn and walk away, slamming the TARDIS door in her face. She saw the TARDIS disappear, her key melt into nothing.
Jack walked in and out of her dreams, too. He caught her in his arms, saving her life. He danced with her, holding her close. He told her she was beautiful and that he loved her. He kissed her and told her that she was worth fighting for.
And then he died.
In her dreams, everyone she loved died or left her. Her dad died over and over, hit by a car. Or else he looked at her with disgust when she called him Dad, and he just walked away.
Her mum died; she got turned into a steel monster with an unrecognisable metal voice.
And a different voice told her that she had strayed far from all that was good. And asked how long she would survive this terrible life. While someone else taunted her about looking at the Doctor, noticing him, wanting him. Wanting him, laughing with him, while all about her people died.
Wanting him and laughing with him while Mickey looked on from the sidelines and was miserable.
In her dreams, death and misery were all around her, and she was at the centre of it all. And she tried to reach for the Doctor’s hand, but he was torn from her, surrounded by a halo of golden light. And he faded away and vanished, leaving only a brilliant whiteness that hurt her eyes.
And, every morning, she woke with moist and heavy eyes.
***
So many times, she picked up her phone and thumbed through the directory until she came to the TARDIS number. So many times, she almost hit dial.
But she stopped herself, every time.
She missed the Doctor so much it hurt. And she hated being back at home. Going back to living with her mum was hard, especially as she could tell that her mum had got used to having the flat to herself. After the second time she ran into Howard during a night-time visit to the bathroom, she resolved to find a bedsit just as soon as she’d saved up a deposit.
She hated her job. Hated her boss, too; he was a fat slob who broke just about every health and safety regulation in the book, treated his staff like dirt and found every excuse to dock their wages, regardless of what the law said. She was looking for another job, but until she’d found one she couldn’t afford to walk out.
And, anyway, part of her was telling her that this was what she deserved. She needed to know how ordinary people lived. For too long, she’d swanned around in that blue box, not a care in the world, thinking herself better than anyone else because she was a Time Lord’s companion. Because the Doctor thought she was the best. Because she’d saved the universe and she was clever and good and special and worth fighting for.
Back here, in London, she was just an ordinary woman struggling to make ends meet in a minimum-wage job. Not particularly bright, not particularly ambitious and not at all special.
But she didn’t phone the Doctor. Because she’d made her decision, and she was going to live with it. Because nothing had changed. She didn’t deserve to be with him any more. Because she wasn’t special. She was selfish and clingy and he was better off without her.
Because, anyway, by now he’d have someone else. Her replacement.
She wondered if he’d found another young, pretty blonde, or if he’d gone for a brunette this time. Or maybe even a redhead.
And she hoped he was happy, even while she wished that he was as miserable as she was.
***
Four months after she came home, she was clearing tables in the café and picked up a Sunday Times someone had left behind. Folding it to put it on the cheap plastic newspaper rack, something caught her eye in the magazine. A byline.
Sarah-Jane Smith.
She stared at the name and felt her heart skip a beat.
What do I do? Do I stay with him?
Yes. Some things are worth getting your heart broken for.
But were they?
And what about all the hurt she’d caused other people in the process?
Find me... if you need to, one day. Find me.
There was an email address at the end of the article. Glancing around quickly to check that her boss wasn’t watching, Rose ripped the page out and stuffed it in her pocket.
***
The house was lovely. Worth a bundle, too, in this part of London. She rang the bell nervously. Sarah-Jane’s email had been lovely - welcoming, friendly, inviting her to visit. But how would she react when she knew what had happened?
But the older woman’s smile was as nice as she remembered. “Rose! Come in!” She stepped back, clearing the way. “I was hoping you’d get in touch. I really didn’t think it’d be this soon, though.”
“No, me neither.” She followed Sarah-Jane into a bright, airy kitchen, on the way spotting K-9 in another room. “Saw your name in the paper, though, an’ had to email you.”
“Well, I’m very glad you did. So, how are you?”
She shrugged. “Okay.”
Sarah-Jane’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, I don’t think so, Rose. But let’s have some coffee and not talk about it just yet. All right?”
So they did. For half an hour or so, they talked about all sorts of things - the latest films, Harriet Jones’s recent cabinet reshuffle, the upcoming election for London mayor, Tube overcrowding. Neither of them mentioned the Doctor. But he was there with them in the room, all the same.
Finally, Sarah offered Rose a coffee refill and said, “Okay, so spill it. You left him? Because I don’t think he’d have left you. Not this soon. Not the way he looked at you.”
How had Sarah noticed that? She hadn’t really seen the two of them together. Not like Mickey had. God, they must have been obnoxiously couply. And they hadn’t even been a couple.
“Yeah, I left ‘im.” And suddenly, before she even realised it was happening, tears were falling.
“Oh, Rose.” Sarah came around the table, rested one hand on Rose’s shoulder and reached for a tissue with the other. “You know, you don’t have to tell me anything. But, if you want to, I make a good listener.”
She talked. For the next hour or so, she did nothing but talk. It didn’t even make sense, any of it; at least, she didn’t think it did. She couldn’t quite make it come out straight: how she’d realised how selfish she’d been, the way she’d treated Mickey, the way she’d treated her mum. Realising, too, that she had to let go of the Doctor before it became too hard.
Then coming home and finding everything changed. It seemed like there was a whole new world here, and she just didn’t fit into it any more.
And Sarah’s vigorous nodding at that point told her that she understood. Of course. It had to have been like that for her, too.
“That was the hardest thing for me,” Sarah said. “I was away for four years. Though, actually, for the first year or so we didn’t travel much, but I still wasn’t living a normal life.” Four years. She hadn’t realised that. She’d been with the Doctor about a year. “Coming back... I hadn’t been back all that much in the meantime, and always with the Doctor. Coming back was hard. I’d been to all those places, seen all those things, and no-one understood. No-one knew. Well, I did have a couple of people I could talk to if I wanted,” she added. “People at UNIT. But I didn’t really want to talk to them. Too many memories.”
Yeah. That made sense, too.
“I felt as if I didn’t belong here, either. But I told myself, after a while, when I finally admitted that he wasn’t coming back for me, that I had to get on with my life. And I learned to.”
“How’d you do it?” She really wanted to know. Because, so far, she was making a spectacular failure of it.
Sarah poured them both some more wine from the bottle she’d opened half an hour ago - because they deserved it, she’d said. Because the Doctor was driving them both to drink. “It wasn’t easy. But I started applying for jobs again - at first, I just worked at a little local paper to earn enough money to live on, but it wasn’t challenging me and I knew I was worth more than that. So I applied for everything, got as much experience as I could, wrote articles on a freelance basis and walked them around as many newsrooms as I could get into, and finally got a job on one of the national dailies. And then, ten years ago, made it to the Sunday Times.”
Rose nodded. “But you had qualifications. You had experience. I don’t ‘ave any of that.”
“But you’re bright,” Sarah said. “I can see that. And the Rose I met was determined. And strong.”
Her gaze fell. “I don’t feel any of that any more. I’m useless, Sarah. I can’t do anything. I... half the time I want to cry. And the rest of the time I just want to shout at everyone an’ tell them to leave me alone.”
“What about the Doctor?” Sarah asked. “How do you feel about him?”
She swallowed. “Sometimes I hate him. An’ sometimes I love him. An’ I don’t know which feeling’s real any more.”
Sarah nodded. “I hated him, too, for a very long time.”
“Yeah, but you... you had reason to. He left you behind. He forgot you! I’m the one that left ‘im.”
“Rose.” Sarah reached across the table and covered her hand. “I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
Getting up, Sarah went to a pine dresser and opened a drawer. After writing for a moment, she came back to the table and passed Rose a piece of paper. “Call this person. I think she can help you. And, when you’re ready, come to see me again.”
***
The woman Sarah sent Rose to was a therapist specialising in grief and loss. And, after several sessions, for which the therapist didn’t charge as some sort of favour owed to Sarah-Jane, things became clearer.
She’d been grieving for Mickey. The fact that he wasn’t dead was irrelevant. He was still gone, and she’d never see him again. And she blamed herself for his loss. She was grieving for her dad, too; for the dad she’d never really known and who’d been stolen from her twice.
It had been wrong of her to expect that the Pete Tyler of the parallel world would just accept her as his daughter. The Doctor had tried to warn her, but she hadn’t listened. She’d been so sure that all she’d needed to do was explain to Pete and then he’d love her as she wanted to love him. His rejection and Mickey’s departure, coming together as they had, had left her unable to cope.
Besides Mickey and her dad, there was Jack. She’d never grieved for him, either. Whether or not he was dead, and she wasn’t really sure about that despite what the Doctor’d said, she’d still lost him. She’d never been able to say goodbye to him properly; though he’d said goodbye to her, she hadn’t believed that she wouldn’t see him again.
Her reactions fit the recognised stages of grief, she saw as the therapist made her talk about her feelings. She’d been numb for a long time. She wasn’t connecting with people around her, apart from Sarah. She was functioning mechanically and avoiding social interaction as much as she could, coming up with excuses as to why she couldn’t go out with her friends or even talk on the phone.
She was intensely disorganised, which wasn’t her usual habit at all. Growing up, she rather than her mum had done much of what needed to be done: making sure that bills were paid, sorting out problems, getting things fixed. Now, she was doing none of that. Things were piling up around her and she was running away from them rather than dealing with them.
Just as she’d run away from the Doctor.
She needed to acknowledge and deal with her grief, the therapist told her, before she could move on properly.
But how? And what did she want to do when she did move on?
Sarah helped. It was Sarah who suggested visiting her dad’s grave again and creating some kind of memorial for Mickey. She’d told everyone that Mickey had gone abroad, that she didn’t know whether he’d come back. She didn’t have to change that story, Sarah said. But, in the same way as putting flowers on a grave could help someone who’d been bereaved, if she had some sort of tribute to Mickey it might help her to let him go.
She did that. There was a patch of waste ground not far from the Powell Estates where she and Mickey had gone when they’d first started going out. He hadn’t had his own flat then, or his car, so it’d been somewhere they could go to be alone. She buried a T-shirt of his, and a keyring he’d given her as a joke years ago. It wasn’t exactly a grave, but it was a place she could visit and think of him. And it helped.
She wrote Jack a letter, telling him how much she’d cared about him and all the things about him she’d liked and appreciated. Loved. And how much she missed him. And she said goodbye. The letter was tucked away in a drawer. She only wished she’d had a photo of him to keep with it, but her memories would have to do.
What she didn’t know was how she was supposed to grieve for the Doctor, when he was still out there in the universe somewhere.
***
“Should I call him?”
She was at Sarah’s again, for one of their fortnightly Sunday lunches. It was ten months after she’d left the Doctor.
Things were better. Not perfect, not by a long way. But she’d finally let go of her grief. Her therapist had pronounced her not healed, exactly, but good enough to end the sessions. She’d said goodbye to Mickey finally. She’d said goodbye to her dad and to Jack.
But she’d never quite managed to say goodbye to the Doctor.
Now, she understood better why she’d left him. Maybe she had been selfish. Maybe she had treated the people she loved and who loved her badly. Maybe she had wanted more than the Doctor could ever offer her.
But the truth was that she hadn’t been in any kind of mental state to make a life-altering decision like that.
She’d been on the edge of depression, a depression she’d sunk deeper into after she’d got home. Her therapist had helped her to see that, though she’d only given the woman an approximation of the facts. Certainly nothing about a time-travelling, nine-hundred-year-old alien. She was still on medication, though was cutting back on the pills now and would soon be off them completely.
There were times when she thought the Doctor should have seen what was happening to her. He should have recognised that she was depressed and done something about it. But then she reminded herself - as her therapist had taught her - that she had to take responsibility for her own actions. She’d made the decision. She’d decided not to tell him what she was feeling. And she’d decided to make the break permanent, instead of just asking for a couple of weeks at home to think.
Now, she deeply regretted it. If she hadn’t been depressed, she’d never have wanted to leave. She’d have stayed, determined to take what she could have from him. Even if he couldn’t offer her forever, even if he could never offer her more than the deep, loving friendship they’d had together, she’d have stayed and made the most of it while she could.
Yes, there’d been her mum to think of, but there were other ways she could have handled that. The Doctor’d made it clear, especially after Mickey left, that he’d take her home for a visit any time she wanted. That he understood that her mum might need her more now. She could have stayed with him and kept an eye on her mum.
But he’d said she could change her mind. She could come back, whenever she wanted. But she hadn’t been able to trust herself to make that decision.
“Do you want to?” Sarah asked.
“Yes.” The answer was immediate. But then she sighed and she could feel her face fall. “I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“Because...” She chewed her lip for a moment. “Because the last ten months’ve been hell. If I go back, I’ll have to leave him again some day. And I don’t know if I can do this again.”
She’d come a long way in those ten months. As well as therapy, she’d signed up to take A-levels. Okay, she was still working in a dead-end job - a different one now - but it was only to make ends meet while she was studying. And she was still living with her mum, but they were doing better now, and as soon as she could afford it she was planning to move out. Her mum deserved the privacy, especially since Howard had moved in three months ago.
Sarah nodded. “I know what you mean. Even though I’d never not have our meeting at the school happen, and it gave me closure I’d needed for a long time, it took a while to get over seeing him again.”
Rose nodded. That made sense. “I won’t, then. But, Sarah, promise me something?”
“Sure. What?”
“Don’t let me give in. Ever. Make sure I don’t phone him. Okay?”
Sarah crossed the room and hugged her. “I won’t. But you’re strong, Rose. You won’t give in, because you know what’s right for you.”
***
tbc
Author: WMR
Characters: Ten, Rose, Jackie Tyler, more to come
Rated: PG (may increase)
Spoilers: All the way to Age of Steel
Summary: “You know this is goodbye, right? No visits. I don’t do that. If you leave now, Rose, this is it.”
With very many thanks to my wonderful BR,
dark_aegis
Chapter 1: Selfish
Chapter 2: Letting Go
They all left. Every one of them.
The curse of the Time Lords, he’d once told Rose. To be alone.
He’d known, despite his promise to her not to leave her behind, that she’d leave him some day. He just hadn’t expected it to be so soon.
He’d been torn, when she’d told him what she wanted. Should he try to talk her out of it? Or should he just respect her decision, regardless of how much it hurt, and let her go?
Sometimes, Rose was very easy to read. But at other times, like earlier, she wasn’t transparent at all. Well, other than clearly being miserable, but this had to have been a hard decision for her. He’d only hope that she was as upset about leaving him as he was about her going. Had she wanted him to persuade her to stay? Had she been expecting some sort of declaration from him, maybe about how much she meant to him?
Though she shouldn’t have needed that. She knew how he felt about her. There was no way in the universe that she couldn’t know. Even Mickey had said it, right there in front of the two of them. And Jake.
They hadn’t needed words, him and Rose. Actions, gestures, looks, even silence were all far more significant. The words had never needed to be said, with either of the regenerations she’d known.
So that couldn’t have been it.
Had she wanted him to talk her out of leaving? He’d thought not, watching her. At the same time, he’d suspected that it wouldn’t have taken much to get her to change her mind. But what had been clear was that she hadn’t wanted to. And he respected that. What she wanted would always be important to him.
So, even though it’d almost killed him, he’d let her go.
And now he was alone. Again.
Well, maybe it was time he got used to it. For a while, anyway.
***
In the end, she was wrong.
Her mum didn’t need her. Not really.
Oh, she was very happy to see her back. Very surprised, but relieved too, to hear that she’d left the Doctor. Not that she still disliked the Doctor; actually, to Rose’s surprise, she and the new Doctor had ended up getting on pretty well. They’d seemed to understand each other. But she was overjoyed that Rose was no longer risking life and limb on distant planets and the furthest reaches of the past or future.
But what she’d missed over the past year was that her mum had a life. A life that didn’t include her, not in the way she’d expected.
Her mum had always had a life of her own, of course. But then, before she’d left to travel the universe with the Doctor, so had she. And, for her mum, of course, that’d been two years ago.
It was two years ago for her friends, too. They’d moved on, done different things with their lives, got jobs - careers, in some cases - started and finished relationships, even got married in some cases. They’d made new friends. Developed new interests. In some cases, there was nothing left to the friendship any more.
She hadn’t noticed before how much everyone had changed. But then, coming home for visits of a few days at a time - if that - was very different from coming home permanently. Before, she ran in and out of their lives, staying around for a few hours, leaving opportunity only for short conversations. And, since she never told any of them what she was really doing and who with, the conversations had been superficial and full of lies.
Au-pairing. Backpacking around the world. Working her way through continents. That was the story her mum had started with and she’d continued. It had been easy enough to sustain on short visits; she hadn’t found it that hard to adapt some of her experiences, to take out any of the alien or fantastical details, and to pretend they’d taken place in Africa or South America instead of Justicia or 1940s London or the far-flung future.
Now, it was harder. Now, she was expected to have souvenirs of places she’d visited. Detailed stories of where she’d been and what she’d done. Some of her friends’ new friends had even been to one or two of the places she was supposed to have visited. To stop her lies being exposed, she started deflecting conversation whenever she was asked about her travels. That inadvertently gave the impression that she’d got airs and wasn’t interested in talking to her friends any more.
The real problem was that they’d all changed. And beyond recognition.
***
“ ‘S about time you got a job, Rose.”
She’d been home two weeks when her mum glared at her across the breakfast-table one morning. “Can’t expect me to keep you indefinitely, can you? Got to start livin’ in the real world again, now you’re not runnin’ off to strange places with him any more.”
Her mum was right. And that was something she’d been putting off.
She needed to start the rest of her life. For the last two weeks, she’d been living in a kind of limbo. As if she’d been pretending that this was just temporary.
She’d been behaving as if this was just like any other visit home; just a little longer than most. But, once she started looking for a job, she’d no longer be able to kid herself that this was just temporary; that any day now the TARDIS would be back and she and the Doctor would be off universe-hopping again. This was it. She was home for good.
And it’d been her own choice. Her decision. Because she’d decided that the time was right. The fact that she’d started regretting it even before she’d walked through the TARDIS door for the last time was irrelevant.
“Yeah.” She sighed, but met her mum’s gaze. “I’ll go down the job-centre today.”
“Yeah, an’ make sure you sign on, too,” her mum said, in a tone that sounded far too much like a nag. “Not that they’ll give you any money yet. Probably make you wait six weeks or something cause you haven’t been signing on. ‘S not like you got any proof that you’ve been working these last two years.”
Yeah, and it wasn’t as if she could put Saving the universe with the last Time Lord on her CV, either.
The other problem was that she had no idea what she wanted to do. Yeah, she could get another job in a shop. But even before Henrik’s had blown up and she’d met the Doctor she’d already known that wasn’t what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.
She’d been able to put off making any decisions about that while she was with the Doctor. But the dream was over now. She’d woken up. And the rest of her life was staring her in the face.
***
So she went through the motions of living. Signed on. Went down the job-centre daily. Applied for a few jobs. Got a job working in a greasy-spoon café - those few days she’d spent as a dinner-lady in Deffry Vale High School had come in handy, after all, despite her complaints.
Missed Mickey.
And, of course, she missed the Doctor.
She dreamed about both of them every night. Mickey was angry and hurt, accusing her of leaving him, treating him like dirt, taking him for granted. Of trying to have it all - the Doctor most of the time, but Mickey whenever the Doctor wasn’t around. She saw herself telling him that there was nothing at home for her any more. Not even him.
She saw him telling her that there was nothing at home for him any more. That he didn’t need her. Didn’t want her.
She saw herself standing by the side of the road, tears streaming down her cheeks, while Mickey walked away and didn’t look back.
She saw the Doctor, in both his forms, holding out his hand to her. Asking her to come with him. Promising to show her wonders beyond her imagination. In her dreams, she saw him kiss her, cradle her in his arms, then lower her to the floor. Why, she didn’t know, because the dream always faded at that point.
She saw him shouting at her, calling her a stupid ape. She saw him tell her that she’d wither and die and she couldn’t expect him to have to watch that happen. She saw him die right in front of her. And she saw him reborn. She saw him run away from her and to another woman. She saw him kiss another woman, and mourn her death. She saw him broken, grief-stricken, believing that she was dead. And she saw him lie to her, send her away, for her own good.
She saw him standing in the TARDIS, expression solemn, saying goodbye to her. Heard him tell her that this was for ever, that she’d never see him again. And she saw him turn and walk away, slamming the TARDIS door in her face. She saw the TARDIS disappear, her key melt into nothing.
Jack walked in and out of her dreams, too. He caught her in his arms, saving her life. He danced with her, holding her close. He told her she was beautiful and that he loved her. He kissed her and told her that she was worth fighting for.
And then he died.
In her dreams, everyone she loved died or left her. Her dad died over and over, hit by a car. Or else he looked at her with disgust when she called him Dad, and he just walked away.
Her mum died; she got turned into a steel monster with an unrecognisable metal voice.
And a different voice told her that she had strayed far from all that was good. And asked how long she would survive this terrible life. While someone else taunted her about looking at the Doctor, noticing him, wanting him. Wanting him, laughing with him, while all about her people died.
Wanting him and laughing with him while Mickey looked on from the sidelines and was miserable.
In her dreams, death and misery were all around her, and she was at the centre of it all. And she tried to reach for the Doctor’s hand, but he was torn from her, surrounded by a halo of golden light. And he faded away and vanished, leaving only a brilliant whiteness that hurt her eyes.
And, every morning, she woke with moist and heavy eyes.
***
So many times, she picked up her phone and thumbed through the directory until she came to the TARDIS number. So many times, she almost hit dial.
But she stopped herself, every time.
She missed the Doctor so much it hurt. And she hated being back at home. Going back to living with her mum was hard, especially as she could tell that her mum had got used to having the flat to herself. After the second time she ran into Howard during a night-time visit to the bathroom, she resolved to find a bedsit just as soon as she’d saved up a deposit.
She hated her job. Hated her boss, too; he was a fat slob who broke just about every health and safety regulation in the book, treated his staff like dirt and found every excuse to dock their wages, regardless of what the law said. She was looking for another job, but until she’d found one she couldn’t afford to walk out.
And, anyway, part of her was telling her that this was what she deserved. She needed to know how ordinary people lived. For too long, she’d swanned around in that blue box, not a care in the world, thinking herself better than anyone else because she was a Time Lord’s companion. Because the Doctor thought she was the best. Because she’d saved the universe and she was clever and good and special and worth fighting for.
Back here, in London, she was just an ordinary woman struggling to make ends meet in a minimum-wage job. Not particularly bright, not particularly ambitious and not at all special.
But she didn’t phone the Doctor. Because she’d made her decision, and she was going to live with it. Because nothing had changed. She didn’t deserve to be with him any more. Because she wasn’t special. She was selfish and clingy and he was better off without her.
Because, anyway, by now he’d have someone else. Her replacement.
She wondered if he’d found another young, pretty blonde, or if he’d gone for a brunette this time. Or maybe even a redhead.
And she hoped he was happy, even while she wished that he was as miserable as she was.
***
Four months after she came home, she was clearing tables in the café and picked up a Sunday Times someone had left behind. Folding it to put it on the cheap plastic newspaper rack, something caught her eye in the magazine. A byline.
Sarah-Jane Smith.
She stared at the name and felt her heart skip a beat.
What do I do? Do I stay with him?
Yes. Some things are worth getting your heart broken for.
But were they?
And what about all the hurt she’d caused other people in the process?
Find me... if you need to, one day. Find me.
There was an email address at the end of the article. Glancing around quickly to check that her boss wasn’t watching, Rose ripped the page out and stuffed it in her pocket.
***
The house was lovely. Worth a bundle, too, in this part of London. She rang the bell nervously. Sarah-Jane’s email had been lovely - welcoming, friendly, inviting her to visit. But how would she react when she knew what had happened?
But the older woman’s smile was as nice as she remembered. “Rose! Come in!” She stepped back, clearing the way. “I was hoping you’d get in touch. I really didn’t think it’d be this soon, though.”
“No, me neither.” She followed Sarah-Jane into a bright, airy kitchen, on the way spotting K-9 in another room. “Saw your name in the paper, though, an’ had to email you.”
“Well, I’m very glad you did. So, how are you?”
She shrugged. “Okay.”
Sarah-Jane’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, I don’t think so, Rose. But let’s have some coffee and not talk about it just yet. All right?”
So they did. For half an hour or so, they talked about all sorts of things - the latest films, Harriet Jones’s recent cabinet reshuffle, the upcoming election for London mayor, Tube overcrowding. Neither of them mentioned the Doctor. But he was there with them in the room, all the same.
Finally, Sarah offered Rose a coffee refill and said, “Okay, so spill it. You left him? Because I don’t think he’d have left you. Not this soon. Not the way he looked at you.”
How had Sarah noticed that? She hadn’t really seen the two of them together. Not like Mickey had. God, they must have been obnoxiously couply. And they hadn’t even been a couple.
“Yeah, I left ‘im.” And suddenly, before she even realised it was happening, tears were falling.
“Oh, Rose.” Sarah came around the table, rested one hand on Rose’s shoulder and reached for a tissue with the other. “You know, you don’t have to tell me anything. But, if you want to, I make a good listener.”
She talked. For the next hour or so, she did nothing but talk. It didn’t even make sense, any of it; at least, she didn’t think it did. She couldn’t quite make it come out straight: how she’d realised how selfish she’d been, the way she’d treated Mickey, the way she’d treated her mum. Realising, too, that she had to let go of the Doctor before it became too hard.
Then coming home and finding everything changed. It seemed like there was a whole new world here, and she just didn’t fit into it any more.
And Sarah’s vigorous nodding at that point told her that she understood. Of course. It had to have been like that for her, too.
“That was the hardest thing for me,” Sarah said. “I was away for four years. Though, actually, for the first year or so we didn’t travel much, but I still wasn’t living a normal life.” Four years. She hadn’t realised that. She’d been with the Doctor about a year. “Coming back... I hadn’t been back all that much in the meantime, and always with the Doctor. Coming back was hard. I’d been to all those places, seen all those things, and no-one understood. No-one knew. Well, I did have a couple of people I could talk to if I wanted,” she added. “People at UNIT. But I didn’t really want to talk to them. Too many memories.”
Yeah. That made sense, too.
“I felt as if I didn’t belong here, either. But I told myself, after a while, when I finally admitted that he wasn’t coming back for me, that I had to get on with my life. And I learned to.”
“How’d you do it?” She really wanted to know. Because, so far, she was making a spectacular failure of it.
Sarah poured them both some more wine from the bottle she’d opened half an hour ago - because they deserved it, she’d said. Because the Doctor was driving them both to drink. “It wasn’t easy. But I started applying for jobs again - at first, I just worked at a little local paper to earn enough money to live on, but it wasn’t challenging me and I knew I was worth more than that. So I applied for everything, got as much experience as I could, wrote articles on a freelance basis and walked them around as many newsrooms as I could get into, and finally got a job on one of the national dailies. And then, ten years ago, made it to the Sunday Times.”
Rose nodded. “But you had qualifications. You had experience. I don’t ‘ave any of that.”
“But you’re bright,” Sarah said. “I can see that. And the Rose I met was determined. And strong.”
Her gaze fell. “I don’t feel any of that any more. I’m useless, Sarah. I can’t do anything. I... half the time I want to cry. And the rest of the time I just want to shout at everyone an’ tell them to leave me alone.”
“What about the Doctor?” Sarah asked. “How do you feel about him?”
She swallowed. “Sometimes I hate him. An’ sometimes I love him. An’ I don’t know which feeling’s real any more.”
Sarah nodded. “I hated him, too, for a very long time.”
“Yeah, but you... you had reason to. He left you behind. He forgot you! I’m the one that left ‘im.”
“Rose.” Sarah reached across the table and covered her hand. “I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
Getting up, Sarah went to a pine dresser and opened a drawer. After writing for a moment, she came back to the table and passed Rose a piece of paper. “Call this person. I think she can help you. And, when you’re ready, come to see me again.”
***
The woman Sarah sent Rose to was a therapist specialising in grief and loss. And, after several sessions, for which the therapist didn’t charge as some sort of favour owed to Sarah-Jane, things became clearer.
She’d been grieving for Mickey. The fact that he wasn’t dead was irrelevant. He was still gone, and she’d never see him again. And she blamed herself for his loss. She was grieving for her dad, too; for the dad she’d never really known and who’d been stolen from her twice.
It had been wrong of her to expect that the Pete Tyler of the parallel world would just accept her as his daughter. The Doctor had tried to warn her, but she hadn’t listened. She’d been so sure that all she’d needed to do was explain to Pete and then he’d love her as she wanted to love him. His rejection and Mickey’s departure, coming together as they had, had left her unable to cope.
Besides Mickey and her dad, there was Jack. She’d never grieved for him, either. Whether or not he was dead, and she wasn’t really sure about that despite what the Doctor’d said, she’d still lost him. She’d never been able to say goodbye to him properly; though he’d said goodbye to her, she hadn’t believed that she wouldn’t see him again.
Her reactions fit the recognised stages of grief, she saw as the therapist made her talk about her feelings. She’d been numb for a long time. She wasn’t connecting with people around her, apart from Sarah. She was functioning mechanically and avoiding social interaction as much as she could, coming up with excuses as to why she couldn’t go out with her friends or even talk on the phone.
She was intensely disorganised, which wasn’t her usual habit at all. Growing up, she rather than her mum had done much of what needed to be done: making sure that bills were paid, sorting out problems, getting things fixed. Now, she was doing none of that. Things were piling up around her and she was running away from them rather than dealing with them.
Just as she’d run away from the Doctor.
She needed to acknowledge and deal with her grief, the therapist told her, before she could move on properly.
But how? And what did she want to do when she did move on?
Sarah helped. It was Sarah who suggested visiting her dad’s grave again and creating some kind of memorial for Mickey. She’d told everyone that Mickey had gone abroad, that she didn’t know whether he’d come back. She didn’t have to change that story, Sarah said. But, in the same way as putting flowers on a grave could help someone who’d been bereaved, if she had some sort of tribute to Mickey it might help her to let him go.
She did that. There was a patch of waste ground not far from the Powell Estates where she and Mickey had gone when they’d first started going out. He hadn’t had his own flat then, or his car, so it’d been somewhere they could go to be alone. She buried a T-shirt of his, and a keyring he’d given her as a joke years ago. It wasn’t exactly a grave, but it was a place she could visit and think of him. And it helped.
She wrote Jack a letter, telling him how much she’d cared about him and all the things about him she’d liked and appreciated. Loved. And how much she missed him. And she said goodbye. The letter was tucked away in a drawer. She only wished she’d had a photo of him to keep with it, but her memories would have to do.
What she didn’t know was how she was supposed to grieve for the Doctor, when he was still out there in the universe somewhere.
***
“Should I call him?”
She was at Sarah’s again, for one of their fortnightly Sunday lunches. It was ten months after she’d left the Doctor.
Things were better. Not perfect, not by a long way. But she’d finally let go of her grief. Her therapist had pronounced her not healed, exactly, but good enough to end the sessions. She’d said goodbye to Mickey finally. She’d said goodbye to her dad and to Jack.
But she’d never quite managed to say goodbye to the Doctor.
Now, she understood better why she’d left him. Maybe she had been selfish. Maybe she had treated the people she loved and who loved her badly. Maybe she had wanted more than the Doctor could ever offer her.
But the truth was that she hadn’t been in any kind of mental state to make a life-altering decision like that.
She’d been on the edge of depression, a depression she’d sunk deeper into after she’d got home. Her therapist had helped her to see that, though she’d only given the woman an approximation of the facts. Certainly nothing about a time-travelling, nine-hundred-year-old alien. She was still on medication, though was cutting back on the pills now and would soon be off them completely.
There were times when she thought the Doctor should have seen what was happening to her. He should have recognised that she was depressed and done something about it. But then she reminded herself - as her therapist had taught her - that she had to take responsibility for her own actions. She’d made the decision. She’d decided not to tell him what she was feeling. And she’d decided to make the break permanent, instead of just asking for a couple of weeks at home to think.
Now, she deeply regretted it. If she hadn’t been depressed, she’d never have wanted to leave. She’d have stayed, determined to take what she could have from him. Even if he couldn’t offer her forever, even if he could never offer her more than the deep, loving friendship they’d had together, she’d have stayed and made the most of it while she could.
Yes, there’d been her mum to think of, but there were other ways she could have handled that. The Doctor’d made it clear, especially after Mickey left, that he’d take her home for a visit any time she wanted. That he understood that her mum might need her more now. She could have stayed with him and kept an eye on her mum.
But he’d said she could change her mind. She could come back, whenever she wanted. But she hadn’t been able to trust herself to make that decision.
“Do you want to?” Sarah asked.
“Yes.” The answer was immediate. But then she sighed and she could feel her face fall. “I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“Because...” She chewed her lip for a moment. “Because the last ten months’ve been hell. If I go back, I’ll have to leave him again some day. And I don’t know if I can do this again.”
She’d come a long way in those ten months. As well as therapy, she’d signed up to take A-levels. Okay, she was still working in a dead-end job - a different one now - but it was only to make ends meet while she was studying. And she was still living with her mum, but they were doing better now, and as soon as she could afford it she was planning to move out. Her mum deserved the privacy, especially since Howard had moved in three months ago.
Sarah nodded. “I know what you mean. Even though I’d never not have our meeting at the school happen, and it gave me closure I’d needed for a long time, it took a while to get over seeing him again.”
Rose nodded. That made sense. “I won’t, then. But, Sarah, promise me something?”
“Sure. What?”
“Don’t let me give in. Ever. Make sure I don’t phone him. Okay?”
Sarah crossed the room and hugged her. “I won’t. But you’re strong, Rose. You won’t give in, because you know what’s right for you.”
***
tbc