Fic: Worlds in Conjunction(1/1)
Note: This is being posted on behalf of Marylane, who can't post on Livejournal at the moment. Hopefully she'll be able to reply at some point in the future. - Gillian
Title: Worlds in Conjunction
Author: Marylane
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Characters: Rose, Ten, Martha Jones. Mentions of Jackie and Mickey.
Rating: Teen. Tops.
Word Count: 5,000.
Spoilers: Through Doomsday, but few specifics. Set sometime after “Love & Monsters”
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its characters are the property of the BBC, no copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: The Doctor makes a slight miscalculation. Written for Wendymr for the Rose Tyler Ficathon. She wanted Rose making hard choices; the Doctor getting something disastrously wrong - with consequences; & Doctor/Rose romance of some sort; and she didn’t want Reinette.
~~~
“Is it still an adventure even if it’s all you ever do?”
“I should hope so. Who wants the bother of making sure the bits in between are boring?”
~~~
“It’s one day, Rose,” he assures her, at the beginning, as the TARDIS doors open and give her that first awed look at Adelphi Station.
“One little day in the middle of what’s shaping up to be a rather spectacular life.”
And looking back, that’s when she should have known.
The universe abhors certainty.
~~~
“So you never get bored, do you?”
“Of course not. You wouldn’t let me.”
~~~
PHOEBUS ADELPHI STATION
The Twin Worlds Federation Welcomes You
Rose receives this particular proclamation from the 7-foot-high letters glittering from the eaves the primary commerce bay. Precisely what she is being welcomed to takes a bit more description.
Colossal vessels zigzag gracefully past each other outside an immense viewport. Thousands of people of dozens of races meander through an open market of such scale that even the Doctor seems impressed.
And all this seems blissfully commonplace when viewed before the backdrop of two multihued, ringed worlds rising before a dazzling blue sun.
“Get a good look while you can,” the Doctor whispers, his voice colored with the ever present amusement of seeing a sight through her eyes. “They’re only in conjunction for 16 more hours.”
“Every once in a great while, even the stars are the same.”
~~~
“Is that what I’m here for, then? To keep you entertained?”
“Heavens no. There’d be an awful lot more song and dance if that were the case.”
~~~
“Here we are then,” he begins, as always. All excitement and erudition. “Adelphi station. Earth year 630,241. Good year. It sees the creative rebirth of just about every form of drama and literature. Fine time for real estate. Faltering autocratic regime. All the figures in place for the Great Adelphi Rebellion of ’43.”
That last bit earns him a knowing look.
“Oh, no worries,” the time traveler assures her, as only he can. “Slight political powder keg. We’ll be long gone before it happens. Though I do think it would be worth dropping in on someday.”
“It’s beautiful,” Rose admits, because she’s nothing if not honest.
Which is why she won’t stand for what’s coming.
“Don’t leave me here,” she demands.
~~~
“What happens when I can’t keep up?”
“Worried you’ll break a hip or something?”
“I age. You don’t.”
“You haven’t done it yet.”
~~~
It’s been the same discussion since the Doctor first told her about this enforced vacation. Her refusal, his reasoning.
Argue. Relent. Repeat.
“You won’t survive where I’m going,” he tells her.
To that Shade’s world.
Too late to save that little boy’s mother, he wants to make sure that whatever those elementals have in mind for Earth doesn’t make it past the planning stages. And she wouldn’t survive so much as a breath of their atmosphere even if she managed to make it through the planet’s psionic shielding, whatever that means.
The logic is sound, as always. And he did offer to send her back to Mum’s flat for the evening, now that Mickey’s gone and she has so few ties left to that world.
But she knows that if Jackie Tyler ever knew it was possible to separate Rose from the Doctor even for one night, she’d expect it to occur with some frequency.
Rose isn’t ready for her mother to know that being left behind is an option.
So it’s to be here. Phoebus Adelphi. Center of a far off human civilization and the starting point of what’s to be an interstellar war.
So long as she keeps to the human sector, she’ll know the language. So long as she doesn’t squander her funds, she’ll live like a queen. For a day.
“At least this will be an adventure,” her Doctor assures her, as he releases her hand.
Rose notes the hesitancy, and not for the first time it occurs to her that this might be a practice run for the inevitable. For her to become Sarah Jane.
“It’s only a day, Rose,” vows her Doctor. “Have a little faith.”
But it isn’t.
Of course.
~~~
“What’s nine hundred to a Time Lord?”
“I gather you don’t mean that in terms of maths.”
“Is 900 old? That’s what I meant. Are you old?”
“That has less to do with time than you’d think.”
~~~
She gives him the benefit of the doubt for far longer than Mickey would stand for. Far longer than most anyone would stand for.
Jackie wouldn’t have lasted five minutes beyond the deadline. Rose doesn’t even think to listen to that devil on her shoulder until the second day is long over.
By the time she’s steeled herself to make that panicked call on her mobile, it’s been nearly three days. And there’s no signal to be found.
Something to do with the planetary alignment, her fellow humans inform her. No subspace signals for the next month or so, so long as the station orbit keeps them between the twin worlds and the sun.
It’s common knowledge, and they all seem quite amused by her naiveté.
At her darkest, she wonders if he was too.
~~~
“So it’s experience, is it? Are you wise for your years?”
“I’m nothing so simple, my dear. No one is.”
~~~
The currency he engineered for her runs out within the week. And then she’s homeless in this ‘slight political powder keg.’
He didn’t bother to inform her that the Human Sector, along with being the center for arts and exploration and freedom, is also the sector of the unrepentantly wealthy. Outside, it isn’t so much a tourist trap as kill or be killed.
Especially if you only speak one of the forty-six official languages of the Twin Worlds Federation.
There’s starvation and disease, and all the other things he usually swans in to put and end to, but he isn’t there to do it.
Because he forgot her there. Left her there. Died elsewhere.
Fell prey to any one of a thousand scenarios she tries to keep herself from envisioning, some of which wherein he’s the unabashed villain.
And she’s neck deep in this world without so much as an idea in which direction home can be found.
By the second night among the masses, she’s been mugged twice (once with nothing much left to take) and the superphone is lying shattered upon the bulkhead below her. A casualty of her useless attempt to fight back.
Like he taught her.
This has to have been a mistake.
~~~
“So do you ever make mistakes?”
“What are you implying?”
“Lord of Time. Sounds like an awful lot to take on without stumbling a bit.”
“And I do, constantly. The trick is in the adjustments.”
~~~
Rose can’t repair it, she knows. She can’t even risk letting someone else make the attempt.
She packs the scattered bits in her pockets and, knowing she won’t be able to account for them and all their potential to disrupt the timeline with inexplicably advanced technology, trades her favorite bracelet for 30 seconds of a civil servant turning a blind eye as the pieces make their way into the station’s primary incinerator.
She’s at the mercy of his temporal meanderings now. There’s nothing to call him back to her but his own conscience.
She trades her coat for a meager excuse for a meal and sets about finding someone who can employ her.
She’d wait. But she doesn’t like picturing what she’d have to trade for her next meal if he decides to dawdle.
~~~
“How about regret?”
“Oh, it’s ghastly, isn’t it? No hiding from regret.”
“So what do you do? Nine hundred years, bet you have more than a few regrets to choose from.”
“You don’t choose. You go on. You build. Alone if you have to.”
~~~
They don’t have a Henrik’s on Phoebus Adelphi, not that she has a resume to get her in the door if they did.
The loading docks aren’t at all particular; they take anyone with a pair of arms and enough desperation, even an undocumented alien like herself.
All manner of sins take place there, and she was never very adept at turning her own blind eye. The job lasts 8 weeks before she’s fired for suggesting the manager rethink his sexual advances toward a co-worker.
Suggesting with a pot of tea poured over what must be a sensitive area.
She supposes the Doctor would be proud of her, but she doesn’t like to think of him if she can help it.
Rissa, the girl she stood up for, who’s of a species whose voices continuously echo with the loveliest of melodies, has a line on a new job in the Human sector. Two of them, actually.
Waitressing experience is a definite plus, and though she doubts her two months spent wiping down tables at the corner pub before she ran off with Jimmy Stone (six hundred millennia ago) quite qualify, they ought to count for something.
Rose still can’t afford better than a mat on the floor, but together they can afford a lock.
~~~
“What’s it like for you? Jumping from the beginning to the end and back?”
“Come along. Find out.”
“I’ll never see all that you’ve seen.”
“S’alright, we’ll just be sure to catch all the best bits in between.”
~~~
Cloden isn’t human either, but you wouldn’t know if you didn’t know what to look for. He’s the first and only person she’s met here who showers everyone with kindness, even the undeserving.
He hires them both straightaway. His establishment isn’t the most reputable of places, but his employees are his family, and after six months of working for him Rose gets the first full night’s sleep she’s had since the Doctor abandoned her.
Abandoned her...Died... Left.
Rose wonders if it even matters.
~~~
“You have a between then? Successes, hardships, lost loves?”
“Really digging now, aren’t we, little human?”
“Truly curious, Time Lord.”
“Aren’t you just.”
~~~
She doesn’t talk about it, but Rose knows that she’s placed highly in the rumor mill.
The little human girl with no papers. Who speaks in an ancient English dialect and struggles to learn all the varied tongues employed around her.
It’s a grand work of fiction that she finally tells them. When she makes their life together mundane enough to be believed.
There was a man. They came here together. She was in love, no doubt about it, and he... he had obligations. And she never knew if there was room for there to be something between the two of them.
Before he left.
Some days she fears something happened to him, some days she just hopes it.
She’s been fearing and hoping for a year and a half now, by her reckoning.
~~~
“I’m taking that as a yes, by the way.”
“As well you should.”
“You can’t live 900 years and not have a few skeletons. Care to share with the group?”
“Oh, now. That would be telling.”
~~~
Rose tries not to keep the countdown clock in her head, but all she hears every night as her head hits the pillow is a steady refrain of “the Great Adelphi Revolution of ’43.”
Tensions are running high. There are strikes and demonstrations. Labor leaders have been disappearing and mercenaries have been flocking to the richer sections, scrambling to be bodyguards to the Haves for when the Have Nots are finally fed up.
It’s strange to know what’s coming, and she wonders if it would even be possible for them all to escape it.
Possible, she wonders, because even if this “Torchwood” place hadn’t laid down travel restrictions, Cloden is both outspoken and connected. And Rissa’s clever. The type that’ll be legendary someday, the type who might just turn out to be historically significant.
If she tells them to run she might just ruin everything, and causality can’t take that chance.
She can’t get over it: little Rose Tyler.
Playing Doctor.
~~~
“What about you own future? Couldn’t you just go back, warn yourself?”
“What? And give myself a weekly update, I suppose?”
“But you could wipe out the bad things before they ever happened. Spend your whole life happy.”
“I challenge you to enjoy a life that’s been spoon-fed to you, my dear.”
~~~
The second year dawns and Rissa catches the eye of the provisional governor.
This wouldn’t be a problem if he weren’t married, corrupt, and suspected in at least a dozen incidents where girls like Rissa inexplicably didn’t make it home.
There are protests every day now. Rose isn’t the only one who knows what’s on the horizon anymore.
Everything and everyone in Adelphi seems to be holding their breath for what’s coming.
Rissa doesn’t come to work one morning. Or the next.
Then one of the provisional governor’s aides tries to pass Cloden a fistful of cash and suggests he gets started in his search for new help.
Rose catches Cloden’s gaze and comes to the same conclusion, about 30 seconds before she wrestles the currency discs from his hands, stalks to the governor’s table, and showers him in his blood money as she spits in his face.
After all, this revolution has got to start somehow, and it’s not as if she has anything better to do.
~~~
“You’ve never warned yourself then? Not once?”
“More than once. It’s a lot harder not to.”
“Then why?”
“Because futures don’t belong to people, not even Time Lords. Futures belong to worlds.”
~~~
Rose takes care not to be a leader. It wouldn’t do for a shopgirl from 21st century London to make an appearance in the history books of this far off era.
But despite herself, she ends up knowing enough that when she’s captured, those in power appreciate that they’ve secured a prize.
When they attempt to “extract” what they need from her, the inquisitors declare that she’s had training. This is no ordinary revolutionary.
How else would she be able to lie under torture like this? Swear that she’s a millennia-dead London girl? That she’s not in their records because she travels through time?
When Cloden and the others come for her, she’s still calling for her Doctor.
And the one the insurgents manage to rustle up just doesn’t fit the bill.
~~~
“You mean sacrifice? The good of the collective, and all that?”
“Good. Bad. Time is the ultimate connection. No one, nothing is free of it.”
“Not even Time Lords?”
“Bit of a misnomer, really.”
~~~
The government opens the airlocks on half the station as a control measure when the violence gets out of hand. Half a million perish by suffocation in less than an hour.
Cloden, the leader now, whose story will be told to countless generations, alternately vilified and idolized, decides it’s time they ended this.
And the real thing begins. Bombings and fire consume Adelphi Station as the Twin Worlds Federation’s regime ends in blast after concussive blast.
The wealthy and corrupt flee the station in droves as their servants declare the station a new sovereignty.
And as Rose cradles Cloden’s ruined body, watches her last link to this place fade away as he dies a hero in her arms, she catches sight of a blue box standing in the center of what used to be that glittering market.
A familiar face in an unfamiliar blue suit and a woman she’s never laid eyes on before quickly close the distance between them.
He’d said it would be worth dropping in on.
“And who exactly are you supposed to be?” The Doctor asks.
~~~
“Do you ever forget, really? The losses?”
“Sometimes.”
“Does it help?”
“Never. It just finds a means to hurt in new and exciting ways.”
~~~
He remembers her. That’s not the problem. In fact, she has to learn precisely what the problem is from his new companion.
New, because Rose apparently doesn’t travel with him anymore.
The woman’s name is Martha. London-born like Rose, but a different London.
She tends to Rose’s wounds in the TARDIS’ medical bay, helps her wash her friend’s blood from her arms as the Doctor paces through his ship, stopping in once every few minutes to sneer at her like her existence is a personal affront.
“Who are you?” he asks again. She hears the danger in it.
“Rose Tyler,” she proclaims, as it’s suddenly the only thing she can be sure of.
She’s met by laughter that isn’t so much laughter as cold fury wrapped in a feeble disguise. “You’re not her,” he offers. “I knew her.”
Every bit of steel in Rose’s making goes into her next words. “You left me here, two and a half years ago,” she utters, leaving no room for argument. “Said you’d be back in a day. Instead you’re off doing...”
He won’t stand for the implication. “No. I came back. 16 hours later, I came back. I got you. We went to the bloody Olympics and then...”
And she sees something there she mostly wishes that she’d missed. “Then what?”
There’s only rage in him now as he advances on her. “You listen to me,” demands the Oncoming Storm, “I loved Rose Tyler.”
Loved. She can’t decide whether to dwell on the word itself or the past tense.
“I don’t know what you are,” come the acid words from the man who admits he should be loving her in return. “But you are most definitely not her.”
~~~
“What about your people? Were they like you?”
“What? Dashing and clever?”
“That too.”
“No. Not really. In fact, they always complained that I was too much like you.”
~~~
Love. Rose forms the word on her tongue again and again, then loses the courage to speak it. Each time she hopes that even half-formed it will have the power to take out some of the sting of the encounter.
This most certainly wasn’t how she hoped that declaration would come between them.
She hears him as he tosses his theories back and forth with his new playmate: Someone cloned Rose during her stay. Some parallel Rose has stumbled her way into his universe. Some paradox has allowed an alternate Rose to be trapped while the real Rose went on.
They begin with some civility but fairly soon they’re brainstorming their manifold theories that she’s not who she knows she is in her presence.
Martha uses the TARDIS’ equipment to prod and scan her, erasing Rose’s newly-acquired scars while she’s at it, while the Doctor continues glaring at her from the corner as though she is something exceedingly offensive.
For no apparent reason, he does the glaring through a pair of 3-D specs and curses at whatever he sees as though it shouldn’t be there, which she supposes must support her theory over his.
Her theory. That she’s real.
The worst part about it is that she supposes she could be any of these things, and she wonders again why the real her hasn’t shown up to argue this with her.
“I died, didn’t I?”
The words catch Martha off guard. “He doesn’t talk about it. He just...”
Rose would have liked her, had things been different. She’s certain of that.
Because she sees the conflict in Martha’s eyes as she decides that, even if Rose isn’t real, she’s owed this.
“Yes,” admits her replacement, and the empathy she radiates is unquestionably genuine. “I think you died.”
~~~
“Why us? You seem to have a decided preference.”
“Short answer: jelly babies.”
“And long answer?”
“A thousand worlds, infinite eras, 900 years, you’re the ones who never cease to surprise me.”
~~~
She passes every test. Memory, cognition, scans with machines she couldn’t hope to understand.
Two days of it. Then Martha disobeys the Doctor’s orders, and Rose finds herself free to wander through what was once her home.
She finds him in the wardrobe, hidden like a small child among an eclectic selection of clothes. Her clothes, answering that as yet unasked question about the speed and timing of her departure.
And he won’t meet her eyes, not even for an instant.
The Doctor, the millennia-old meddler in the workings of the universe itself, and he seems to be afraid of her.
“How’s it happen, then?” she asks quietly, still hoping that the universe has some solution up its sleeve for the two of them. She prays it isn’t too greedy to think she’s earned that.
“What’s that?”
“How do I die?” Those eyes she’d been pining for like a child all this time go wide at the inquiry, catch hers momentarily and turn away in anger.
She’s not about to let that stop her. “If you’re so bloody convinced that I’m duplicate or an alternate or...something not me, then there’s no point in hiding it.”
She’s not ready to hear this, but still: “How does Rose Tyler die?”
“I don’t know what you are,” he repeats, as though the repetition gives it credibility. All nine hundred years of him reduced to a child’s defense. “But she’s gone.”
~~~
“What about caring? Love? Do you do that?”
“You know, there’s a different definition for that word on every world in this universe?”
“Love, you mean? Somehow I thought that was universal.”
“I said there was a definition on every world, didn’t I?”
~~~
She finds herself reaching for his hand, the first time she’s been allowed to touch him. There may be doubts as to how real she is, but she feels his pulse hammering through his wrist and there can be no doubts about him.
He came back, and it wasn’t for her.
“I’m here.” Rose whispers, cursing whatever human frailty it is that forces her to speak her piece through a voice she can’t keep from breaking, “You left me here.”
“I lost you.”
And with those words she’s not talking to the Doctor anymore. She wishes she knew the name of the man before her.
“You left me.” Rose echoes. She can’t keep it from being an accusation.
“I’d never,” and there are tears now. Rose never thought she’d see the Doctor cry.
While she’s at it, she has to confess that she never, never ever, truly believed that the Doctor was capable of loving her. Not this way.
Before she knows it she’s placed every bit of anger and misery and longing and adoration behind a brutal slap across his tearstained face.
“Rose?” asks the Lonely God.
Convinced.
~~~
“Do you ever wish things were different? Do you ever wish you could play human?”
“No.”
“Never? Never ever? I think I’d spend forever wondering.”
“Never say ‘never ever.’ Or ‘forever,’ for that matter. And when I do my wishing, I don’t limit my wishes to mere playing.”
~~~
Sometime later, safe in each other’s arms, she tells him of the life she’s been leading in his absence. Rose herself doesn’t know if she’s making conversation or just rubbing it in, but whatever the case, the idea that he’s there to hear it is far too intoxicating for her to remain silent.
He interrupts her constantly with his lips on hers or on some other equally distracting location, laughs with her as poor Martha stumbles in on them in the buff and flees with a wink and a muttered apology, and she thinks it should be impossible for one insignificant human to be this content.
Ever, not just after what she’s endured to get here.
Maybe she is a copy, or some universal mistake. She can live with that uncertainty.
Because he’s real and she’s been in love with him from the instant he took her hand and told her that he was the one who felt the motion of the universe.
And they had this day together.
~~~
“What’s so terrible about that word?”
“Say again?”
“Forever. What’s so bad about forever?”
“It promises the one thing that can’t be done.”
~~~
It’s all settled very quickly. Rose wants to stay behind long enough to give her compatriots a proper send off, but afterwards there’s an entire universe waiting for the three of them.
Three, she can handle, so long as he’s one of them.
Her clothes, she burns. All but the t-shirt and jeans she brought with her, both no worse for wear than after any of her other adventures. Her meager belongings, mementos of two years of as yet unexplained hell, are packed. After a haircut and a long shower the likes of which she literally hasn’t had in years at this point, she starts to feel like plain old Rose again, and the sensation is beyond wonderful.
She gives Martha the tour as he prepares their departure and she resolves to forget all but scattered joys she managed to scrounge up in terrible times. She tries to remember if her step was this light before Adelphi, and she thinks she just might have reclaimed herself and more.
But as she and Martha reach that same main commerce bay from that day that became two years, she finds that the universe did have something up its sleeve after all, and stops dead in her tracks.
Because those glittering words which welcomed her on that first day in this miserable place have been shaken from their fastenings and lie scattered among the casualties on the ruined deck. No longer welcoming her to Phoebus Adelphi.
Only seven ever-so-complicated letters remain of that once hopeful greeting, glaring at her ominously from the bay walls.
“I have to stay,” Rose Tyler whispers through sudden tears.
As she realizes that all of this may have been his mistake, but it was her choice.
They had today, their one holiday, their chance to be together before whatever it is that will happen to her, for one reason, and one reason alone: A parting gift from an old friend.
A friend who always signs her name.
B AD
Wo l F
~~~
“If it were possible to go back, save your people... Would you? Or is it something that..?”
“Was it destiny, you mean?”
“Destiny... history... Is it meant to be as it was?”
~~~
Martha protests, of course. As she should. The Doctor only takes the best, after all.
And there’s no way to make her understand. Flippant explanations of temporal paradoxes are still very much the Doctor’s domain.
Rose resorts to begging, assures her that time will unfold as it has to. She puts all the conviction she wishes she was feeling behind the words, and demands that Martha have the Doctor come back in one day.
One little day.
If she’s still there when they return, she’ll go with them. Consign herself to being Rose Tyler’s copy or the universe’s unexplained glitch, the next best thing to the woman he loved. It’s his turn to have faith.
And he does. In her.
The TARDIS disappears, and she finds herself alone and doubting as she stares out at an identical sunrise to the one of that long ago day.
“Every once in a great while, even the stars are the same,” Rose murmurs.
In this case, two years, six months, eight days later. And just long enough for a slight course miscalculation.
The TARDIS, her TARDIS, materializes behind her.
~~~
“Time, destiny. Little words for something so much greater than human understanding.”
“No need to insult me, Doctor.”
“No insult intended. But you ask if the genocide of my race was destined? If any of my roving through time and space is destiny?”
“Yes.”
“Ask me in another 900 years. Maybe then I can pretend I have an answer.”
~~~
Rose puts her key to the lock and steps inside to find him tinkering at the TARDIS controls, pinstripe suit and cheeky smile both intact and welcoming.
He’s been gone 4 days by his reckoning, and she’s been away an uneventful 16 hours.
She can never tell him what she’s been through, what she’s seen, not again. This she knows.
Not in her lifetime.
Abstract losses and the occasional slip up he can handle, but knowing he abandoned her for two years to one of the bloodier revolutions in human history is another matter.
It wouldn’t be Gallifrey. Or the Fourth Great and Bountiful. No uncorrectable loss in the face of odds too incalculable to contemplate.
It would be his own mistake, and the cost of remedying it could have consequences for a galaxy and untold future centuries. Reapers. Paradoxes. Countless iterations based on her presence in the timeline.
Not to mention a certain Doctor with a blue suit and a young Miss Martha Jones.
But it could be done. Erased. If she asked.
She’s learned so much from him about time, and she knows he would risk these things and more for her if she ever breathed a word.
But she bears no scars. No telltale signs of his little gaffe.
Not on the outside, anyway.
“I lost my phone,” she informs him.
~~~
“Your Time Lord mystique is fading a bit, Doctor.”
“That’s all right. There’s always someone out there who’ll still find me daunting.”
~~~
Sometime later, once she’s finally managed to turn a corner in the TARDIS and not be surprised to find a room or a circuit or a certain face just as she remembered it, Rose spends four hours committing the life she’s lived to paper. Her own unpredictable yet seemingly predestined existence.
And the fact that no matter what becomes of her, the one time she had the power to do absolutely anything, the time where she saw all that would become of both of them, every consequence, she gave them that one short chance to be in love.
Together.
And then gave him back to the manifold futures he safeguards.
She places the letter in the pocket of his old duster in the TARDIS wardrobe, conscious of the innate cruelty of it.
But at the same time Rose knows that someday he’ll make the connection on his own. That’s who he is. And she wants her words to be there when he does. When he and Martha return to find that Rose Tyler has integrated herself back into the timeline.
To find that she’s only a memory.
It’s no surprise to her that she’ll be gone someday. She wonders at the how and when.
Old and grey or young and fighting.
And when she’s at her most desperate to hope for old age and fond memories, she remembers the words of the Beast and she thinks that she might not have it in her to survive this in silence after all.
“I forgot to ask,” comes the sheepish admission from behind the last Time Lord’s smile. She turns to find him peering in at her, no doubt wondering at the unaccountably tearful brown eyes.
“Well?” asks the love of Rose Tyler’s life. “How was the holiday?”
She smiles, forever banishing a hundred horrid recollections from her mind and replacing them with the future her friends died to make and the singular joy of her life at his side. It’s the one “forever” she knows she’ll manage somehow.
“Good time, that.” Rose replies.
~~~
“Tell me about Rose, Doctor. Tell me how she died.”
“She didn’t, my dear Ms. Jones. Not in this world.”
~~~
Title: Worlds in Conjunction
Author: Marylane
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Characters: Rose, Ten, Martha Jones. Mentions of Jackie and Mickey.
Rating: Teen. Tops.
Word Count: 5,000.
Spoilers: Through Doomsday, but few specifics. Set sometime after “Love & Monsters”
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its characters are the property of the BBC, no copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: The Doctor makes a slight miscalculation. Written for Wendymr for the Rose Tyler Ficathon. She wanted Rose making hard choices; the Doctor getting something disastrously wrong - with consequences; & Doctor/Rose romance of some sort; and she didn’t want Reinette.
~~~
“Is it still an adventure even if it’s all you ever do?”
“I should hope so. Who wants the bother of making sure the bits in between are boring?”
~~~
“It’s one day, Rose,” he assures her, at the beginning, as the TARDIS doors open and give her that first awed look at Adelphi Station.
“One little day in the middle of what’s shaping up to be a rather spectacular life.”
And looking back, that’s when she should have known.
The universe abhors certainty.
~~~
“So you never get bored, do you?”
“Of course not. You wouldn’t let me.”
~~~
PHOEBUS ADELPHI STATION
The Twin Worlds Federation Welcomes You
Rose receives this particular proclamation from the 7-foot-high letters glittering from the eaves the primary commerce bay. Precisely what she is being welcomed to takes a bit more description.
Colossal vessels zigzag gracefully past each other outside an immense viewport. Thousands of people of dozens of races meander through an open market of such scale that even the Doctor seems impressed.
And all this seems blissfully commonplace when viewed before the backdrop of two multihued, ringed worlds rising before a dazzling blue sun.
“Get a good look while you can,” the Doctor whispers, his voice colored with the ever present amusement of seeing a sight through her eyes. “They’re only in conjunction for 16 more hours.”
“Every once in a great while, even the stars are the same.”
~~~
“Is that what I’m here for, then? To keep you entertained?”
“Heavens no. There’d be an awful lot more song and dance if that were the case.”
~~~
“Here we are then,” he begins, as always. All excitement and erudition. “Adelphi station. Earth year 630,241. Good year. It sees the creative rebirth of just about every form of drama and literature. Fine time for real estate. Faltering autocratic regime. All the figures in place for the Great Adelphi Rebellion of ’43.”
That last bit earns him a knowing look.
“Oh, no worries,” the time traveler assures her, as only he can. “Slight political powder keg. We’ll be long gone before it happens. Though I do think it would be worth dropping in on someday.”
“It’s beautiful,” Rose admits, because she’s nothing if not honest.
Which is why she won’t stand for what’s coming.
“Don’t leave me here,” she demands.
~~~
“What happens when I can’t keep up?”
“Worried you’ll break a hip or something?”
“I age. You don’t.”
“You haven’t done it yet.”
~~~
It’s been the same discussion since the Doctor first told her about this enforced vacation. Her refusal, his reasoning.
Argue. Relent. Repeat.
“You won’t survive where I’m going,” he tells her.
To that Shade’s world.
Too late to save that little boy’s mother, he wants to make sure that whatever those elementals have in mind for Earth doesn’t make it past the planning stages. And she wouldn’t survive so much as a breath of their atmosphere even if she managed to make it through the planet’s psionic shielding, whatever that means.
The logic is sound, as always. And he did offer to send her back to Mum’s flat for the evening, now that Mickey’s gone and she has so few ties left to that world.
But she knows that if Jackie Tyler ever knew it was possible to separate Rose from the Doctor even for one night, she’d expect it to occur with some frequency.
Rose isn’t ready for her mother to know that being left behind is an option.
So it’s to be here. Phoebus Adelphi. Center of a far off human civilization and the starting point of what’s to be an interstellar war.
So long as she keeps to the human sector, she’ll know the language. So long as she doesn’t squander her funds, she’ll live like a queen. For a day.
“At least this will be an adventure,” her Doctor assures her, as he releases her hand.
Rose notes the hesitancy, and not for the first time it occurs to her that this might be a practice run for the inevitable. For her to become Sarah Jane.
“It’s only a day, Rose,” vows her Doctor. “Have a little faith.”
But it isn’t.
Of course.
~~~
“What’s nine hundred to a Time Lord?”
“I gather you don’t mean that in terms of maths.”
“Is 900 old? That’s what I meant. Are you old?”
“That has less to do with time than you’d think.”
~~~
She gives him the benefit of the doubt for far longer than Mickey would stand for. Far longer than most anyone would stand for.
Jackie wouldn’t have lasted five minutes beyond the deadline. Rose doesn’t even think to listen to that devil on her shoulder until the second day is long over.
By the time she’s steeled herself to make that panicked call on her mobile, it’s been nearly three days. And there’s no signal to be found.
Something to do with the planetary alignment, her fellow humans inform her. No subspace signals for the next month or so, so long as the station orbit keeps them between the twin worlds and the sun.
It’s common knowledge, and they all seem quite amused by her naiveté.
At her darkest, she wonders if he was too.
~~~
“So it’s experience, is it? Are you wise for your years?”
“I’m nothing so simple, my dear. No one is.”
~~~
The currency he engineered for her runs out within the week. And then she’s homeless in this ‘slight political powder keg.’
He didn’t bother to inform her that the Human Sector, along with being the center for arts and exploration and freedom, is also the sector of the unrepentantly wealthy. Outside, it isn’t so much a tourist trap as kill or be killed.
Especially if you only speak one of the forty-six official languages of the Twin Worlds Federation.
There’s starvation and disease, and all the other things he usually swans in to put and end to, but he isn’t there to do it.
Because he forgot her there. Left her there. Died elsewhere.
Fell prey to any one of a thousand scenarios she tries to keep herself from envisioning, some of which wherein he’s the unabashed villain.
And she’s neck deep in this world without so much as an idea in which direction home can be found.
By the second night among the masses, she’s been mugged twice (once with nothing much left to take) and the superphone is lying shattered upon the bulkhead below her. A casualty of her useless attempt to fight back.
Like he taught her.
This has to have been a mistake.
~~~
“So do you ever make mistakes?”
“What are you implying?”
“Lord of Time. Sounds like an awful lot to take on without stumbling a bit.”
“And I do, constantly. The trick is in the adjustments.”
~~~
Rose can’t repair it, she knows. She can’t even risk letting someone else make the attempt.
She packs the scattered bits in her pockets and, knowing she won’t be able to account for them and all their potential to disrupt the timeline with inexplicably advanced technology, trades her favorite bracelet for 30 seconds of a civil servant turning a blind eye as the pieces make their way into the station’s primary incinerator.
She’s at the mercy of his temporal meanderings now. There’s nothing to call him back to her but his own conscience.
She trades her coat for a meager excuse for a meal and sets about finding someone who can employ her.
She’d wait. But she doesn’t like picturing what she’d have to trade for her next meal if he decides to dawdle.
~~~
“How about regret?”
“Oh, it’s ghastly, isn’t it? No hiding from regret.”
“So what do you do? Nine hundred years, bet you have more than a few regrets to choose from.”
“You don’t choose. You go on. You build. Alone if you have to.”
~~~
They don’t have a Henrik’s on Phoebus Adelphi, not that she has a resume to get her in the door if they did.
The loading docks aren’t at all particular; they take anyone with a pair of arms and enough desperation, even an undocumented alien like herself.
All manner of sins take place there, and she was never very adept at turning her own blind eye. The job lasts 8 weeks before she’s fired for suggesting the manager rethink his sexual advances toward a co-worker.
Suggesting with a pot of tea poured over what must be a sensitive area.
She supposes the Doctor would be proud of her, but she doesn’t like to think of him if she can help it.
Rissa, the girl she stood up for, who’s of a species whose voices continuously echo with the loveliest of melodies, has a line on a new job in the Human sector. Two of them, actually.
Waitressing experience is a definite plus, and though she doubts her two months spent wiping down tables at the corner pub before she ran off with Jimmy Stone (six hundred millennia ago) quite qualify, they ought to count for something.
Rose still can’t afford better than a mat on the floor, but together they can afford a lock.
~~~
“What’s it like for you? Jumping from the beginning to the end and back?”
“Come along. Find out.”
“I’ll never see all that you’ve seen.”
“S’alright, we’ll just be sure to catch all the best bits in between.”
~~~
Cloden isn’t human either, but you wouldn’t know if you didn’t know what to look for. He’s the first and only person she’s met here who showers everyone with kindness, even the undeserving.
He hires them both straightaway. His establishment isn’t the most reputable of places, but his employees are his family, and after six months of working for him Rose gets the first full night’s sleep she’s had since the Doctor abandoned her.
Abandoned her...Died... Left.
Rose wonders if it even matters.
~~~
“You have a between then? Successes, hardships, lost loves?”
“Really digging now, aren’t we, little human?”
“Truly curious, Time Lord.”
“Aren’t you just.”
~~~
She doesn’t talk about it, but Rose knows that she’s placed highly in the rumor mill.
The little human girl with no papers. Who speaks in an ancient English dialect and struggles to learn all the varied tongues employed around her.
It’s a grand work of fiction that she finally tells them. When she makes their life together mundane enough to be believed.
There was a man. They came here together. She was in love, no doubt about it, and he... he had obligations. And she never knew if there was room for there to be something between the two of them.
Before he left.
Some days she fears something happened to him, some days she just hopes it.
She’s been fearing and hoping for a year and a half now, by her reckoning.
~~~
“I’m taking that as a yes, by the way.”
“As well you should.”
“You can’t live 900 years and not have a few skeletons. Care to share with the group?”
“Oh, now. That would be telling.”
~~~
Rose tries not to keep the countdown clock in her head, but all she hears every night as her head hits the pillow is a steady refrain of “the Great Adelphi Revolution of ’43.”
Tensions are running high. There are strikes and demonstrations. Labor leaders have been disappearing and mercenaries have been flocking to the richer sections, scrambling to be bodyguards to the Haves for when the Have Nots are finally fed up.
It’s strange to know what’s coming, and she wonders if it would even be possible for them all to escape it.
Possible, she wonders, because even if this “Torchwood” place hadn’t laid down travel restrictions, Cloden is both outspoken and connected. And Rissa’s clever. The type that’ll be legendary someday, the type who might just turn out to be historically significant.
If she tells them to run she might just ruin everything, and causality can’t take that chance.
She can’t get over it: little Rose Tyler.
Playing Doctor.
~~~
“What about you own future? Couldn’t you just go back, warn yourself?”
“What? And give myself a weekly update, I suppose?”
“But you could wipe out the bad things before they ever happened. Spend your whole life happy.”
“I challenge you to enjoy a life that’s been spoon-fed to you, my dear.”
~~~
The second year dawns and Rissa catches the eye of the provisional governor.
This wouldn’t be a problem if he weren’t married, corrupt, and suspected in at least a dozen incidents where girls like Rissa inexplicably didn’t make it home.
There are protests every day now. Rose isn’t the only one who knows what’s on the horizon anymore.
Everything and everyone in Adelphi seems to be holding their breath for what’s coming.
Rissa doesn’t come to work one morning. Or the next.
Then one of the provisional governor’s aides tries to pass Cloden a fistful of cash and suggests he gets started in his search for new help.
Rose catches Cloden’s gaze and comes to the same conclusion, about 30 seconds before she wrestles the currency discs from his hands, stalks to the governor’s table, and showers him in his blood money as she spits in his face.
After all, this revolution has got to start somehow, and it’s not as if she has anything better to do.
~~~
“You’ve never warned yourself then? Not once?”
“More than once. It’s a lot harder not to.”
“Then why?”
“Because futures don’t belong to people, not even Time Lords. Futures belong to worlds.”
~~~
Rose takes care not to be a leader. It wouldn’t do for a shopgirl from 21st century London to make an appearance in the history books of this far off era.
But despite herself, she ends up knowing enough that when she’s captured, those in power appreciate that they’ve secured a prize.
When they attempt to “extract” what they need from her, the inquisitors declare that she’s had training. This is no ordinary revolutionary.
How else would she be able to lie under torture like this? Swear that she’s a millennia-dead London girl? That she’s not in their records because she travels through time?
When Cloden and the others come for her, she’s still calling for her Doctor.
And the one the insurgents manage to rustle up just doesn’t fit the bill.
~~~
“You mean sacrifice? The good of the collective, and all that?”
“Good. Bad. Time is the ultimate connection. No one, nothing is free of it.”
“Not even Time Lords?”
“Bit of a misnomer, really.”
~~~
The government opens the airlocks on half the station as a control measure when the violence gets out of hand. Half a million perish by suffocation in less than an hour.
Cloden, the leader now, whose story will be told to countless generations, alternately vilified and idolized, decides it’s time they ended this.
And the real thing begins. Bombings and fire consume Adelphi Station as the Twin Worlds Federation’s regime ends in blast after concussive blast.
The wealthy and corrupt flee the station in droves as their servants declare the station a new sovereignty.
And as Rose cradles Cloden’s ruined body, watches her last link to this place fade away as he dies a hero in her arms, she catches sight of a blue box standing in the center of what used to be that glittering market.
A familiar face in an unfamiliar blue suit and a woman she’s never laid eyes on before quickly close the distance between them.
He’d said it would be worth dropping in on.
“And who exactly are you supposed to be?” The Doctor asks.
~~~
“Do you ever forget, really? The losses?”
“Sometimes.”
“Does it help?”
“Never. It just finds a means to hurt in new and exciting ways.”
~~~
He remembers her. That’s not the problem. In fact, she has to learn precisely what the problem is from his new companion.
New, because Rose apparently doesn’t travel with him anymore.
The woman’s name is Martha. London-born like Rose, but a different London.
She tends to Rose’s wounds in the TARDIS’ medical bay, helps her wash her friend’s blood from her arms as the Doctor paces through his ship, stopping in once every few minutes to sneer at her like her existence is a personal affront.
“Who are you?” he asks again. She hears the danger in it.
“Rose Tyler,” she proclaims, as it’s suddenly the only thing she can be sure of.
She’s met by laughter that isn’t so much laughter as cold fury wrapped in a feeble disguise. “You’re not her,” he offers. “I knew her.”
Every bit of steel in Rose’s making goes into her next words. “You left me here, two and a half years ago,” she utters, leaving no room for argument. “Said you’d be back in a day. Instead you’re off doing...”
He won’t stand for the implication. “No. I came back. 16 hours later, I came back. I got you. We went to the bloody Olympics and then...”
And she sees something there she mostly wishes that she’d missed. “Then what?”
There’s only rage in him now as he advances on her. “You listen to me,” demands the Oncoming Storm, “I loved Rose Tyler.”
Loved. She can’t decide whether to dwell on the word itself or the past tense.
“I don’t know what you are,” come the acid words from the man who admits he should be loving her in return. “But you are most definitely not her.”
~~~
“What about your people? Were they like you?”
“What? Dashing and clever?”
“That too.”
“No. Not really. In fact, they always complained that I was too much like you.”
~~~
Love. Rose forms the word on her tongue again and again, then loses the courage to speak it. Each time she hopes that even half-formed it will have the power to take out some of the sting of the encounter.
This most certainly wasn’t how she hoped that declaration would come between them.
She hears him as he tosses his theories back and forth with his new playmate: Someone cloned Rose during her stay. Some parallel Rose has stumbled her way into his universe. Some paradox has allowed an alternate Rose to be trapped while the real Rose went on.
They begin with some civility but fairly soon they’re brainstorming their manifold theories that she’s not who she knows she is in her presence.
Martha uses the TARDIS’ equipment to prod and scan her, erasing Rose’s newly-acquired scars while she’s at it, while the Doctor continues glaring at her from the corner as though she is something exceedingly offensive.
For no apparent reason, he does the glaring through a pair of 3-D specs and curses at whatever he sees as though it shouldn’t be there, which she supposes must support her theory over his.
Her theory. That she’s real.
The worst part about it is that she supposes she could be any of these things, and she wonders again why the real her hasn’t shown up to argue this with her.
“I died, didn’t I?”
The words catch Martha off guard. “He doesn’t talk about it. He just...”
Rose would have liked her, had things been different. She’s certain of that.
Because she sees the conflict in Martha’s eyes as she decides that, even if Rose isn’t real, she’s owed this.
“Yes,” admits her replacement, and the empathy she radiates is unquestionably genuine. “I think you died.”
~~~
“Why us? You seem to have a decided preference.”
“Short answer: jelly babies.”
“And long answer?”
“A thousand worlds, infinite eras, 900 years, you’re the ones who never cease to surprise me.”
~~~
She passes every test. Memory, cognition, scans with machines she couldn’t hope to understand.
Two days of it. Then Martha disobeys the Doctor’s orders, and Rose finds herself free to wander through what was once her home.
She finds him in the wardrobe, hidden like a small child among an eclectic selection of clothes. Her clothes, answering that as yet unasked question about the speed and timing of her departure.
And he won’t meet her eyes, not even for an instant.
The Doctor, the millennia-old meddler in the workings of the universe itself, and he seems to be afraid of her.
“How’s it happen, then?” she asks quietly, still hoping that the universe has some solution up its sleeve for the two of them. She prays it isn’t too greedy to think she’s earned that.
“What’s that?”
“How do I die?” Those eyes she’d been pining for like a child all this time go wide at the inquiry, catch hers momentarily and turn away in anger.
She’s not about to let that stop her. “If you’re so bloody convinced that I’m duplicate or an alternate or...something not me, then there’s no point in hiding it.”
She’s not ready to hear this, but still: “How does Rose Tyler die?”
“I don’t know what you are,” he repeats, as though the repetition gives it credibility. All nine hundred years of him reduced to a child’s defense. “But she’s gone.”
~~~
“What about caring? Love? Do you do that?”
“You know, there’s a different definition for that word on every world in this universe?”
“Love, you mean? Somehow I thought that was universal.”
“I said there was a definition on every world, didn’t I?”
~~~
She finds herself reaching for his hand, the first time she’s been allowed to touch him. There may be doubts as to how real she is, but she feels his pulse hammering through his wrist and there can be no doubts about him.
He came back, and it wasn’t for her.
“I’m here.” Rose whispers, cursing whatever human frailty it is that forces her to speak her piece through a voice she can’t keep from breaking, “You left me here.”
“I lost you.”
And with those words she’s not talking to the Doctor anymore. She wishes she knew the name of the man before her.
“You left me.” Rose echoes. She can’t keep it from being an accusation.
“I’d never,” and there are tears now. Rose never thought she’d see the Doctor cry.
While she’s at it, she has to confess that she never, never ever, truly believed that the Doctor was capable of loving her. Not this way.
Before she knows it she’s placed every bit of anger and misery and longing and adoration behind a brutal slap across his tearstained face.
“Rose?” asks the Lonely God.
Convinced.
~~~
“Do you ever wish things were different? Do you ever wish you could play human?”
“No.”
“Never? Never ever? I think I’d spend forever wondering.”
“Never say ‘never ever.’ Or ‘forever,’ for that matter. And when I do my wishing, I don’t limit my wishes to mere playing.”
~~~
Sometime later, safe in each other’s arms, she tells him of the life she’s been leading in his absence. Rose herself doesn’t know if she’s making conversation or just rubbing it in, but whatever the case, the idea that he’s there to hear it is far too intoxicating for her to remain silent.
He interrupts her constantly with his lips on hers or on some other equally distracting location, laughs with her as poor Martha stumbles in on them in the buff and flees with a wink and a muttered apology, and she thinks it should be impossible for one insignificant human to be this content.
Ever, not just after what she’s endured to get here.
Maybe she is a copy, or some universal mistake. She can live with that uncertainty.
Because he’s real and she’s been in love with him from the instant he took her hand and told her that he was the one who felt the motion of the universe.
And they had this day together.
~~~
“What’s so terrible about that word?”
“Say again?”
“Forever. What’s so bad about forever?”
“It promises the one thing that can’t be done.”
~~~
It’s all settled very quickly. Rose wants to stay behind long enough to give her compatriots a proper send off, but afterwards there’s an entire universe waiting for the three of them.
Three, she can handle, so long as he’s one of them.
Her clothes, she burns. All but the t-shirt and jeans she brought with her, both no worse for wear than after any of her other adventures. Her meager belongings, mementos of two years of as yet unexplained hell, are packed. After a haircut and a long shower the likes of which she literally hasn’t had in years at this point, she starts to feel like plain old Rose again, and the sensation is beyond wonderful.
She gives Martha the tour as he prepares their departure and she resolves to forget all but scattered joys she managed to scrounge up in terrible times. She tries to remember if her step was this light before Adelphi, and she thinks she just might have reclaimed herself and more.
But as she and Martha reach that same main commerce bay from that day that became two years, she finds that the universe did have something up its sleeve after all, and stops dead in her tracks.
Because those glittering words which welcomed her on that first day in this miserable place have been shaken from their fastenings and lie scattered among the casualties on the ruined deck. No longer welcoming her to Phoebus Adelphi.
Only seven ever-so-complicated letters remain of that once hopeful greeting, glaring at her ominously from the bay walls.
“I have to stay,” Rose Tyler whispers through sudden tears.
As she realizes that all of this may have been his mistake, but it was her choice.
They had today, their one holiday, their chance to be together before whatever it is that will happen to her, for one reason, and one reason alone: A parting gift from an old friend.
A friend who always signs her name.
B AD
Wo l F
~~~
“If it were possible to go back, save your people... Would you? Or is it something that..?”
“Was it destiny, you mean?”
“Destiny... history... Is it meant to be as it was?”
~~~
Martha protests, of course. As she should. The Doctor only takes the best, after all.
And there’s no way to make her understand. Flippant explanations of temporal paradoxes are still very much the Doctor’s domain.
Rose resorts to begging, assures her that time will unfold as it has to. She puts all the conviction she wishes she was feeling behind the words, and demands that Martha have the Doctor come back in one day.
One little day.
If she’s still there when they return, she’ll go with them. Consign herself to being Rose Tyler’s copy or the universe’s unexplained glitch, the next best thing to the woman he loved. It’s his turn to have faith.
And he does. In her.
The TARDIS disappears, and she finds herself alone and doubting as she stares out at an identical sunrise to the one of that long ago day.
“Every once in a great while, even the stars are the same,” Rose murmurs.
In this case, two years, six months, eight days later. And just long enough for a slight course miscalculation.
The TARDIS, her TARDIS, materializes behind her.
~~~
“Time, destiny. Little words for something so much greater than human understanding.”
“No need to insult me, Doctor.”
“No insult intended. But you ask if the genocide of my race was destined? If any of my roving through time and space is destiny?”
“Yes.”
“Ask me in another 900 years. Maybe then I can pretend I have an answer.”
~~~
Rose puts her key to the lock and steps inside to find him tinkering at the TARDIS controls, pinstripe suit and cheeky smile both intact and welcoming.
He’s been gone 4 days by his reckoning, and she’s been away an uneventful 16 hours.
She can never tell him what she’s been through, what she’s seen, not again. This she knows.
Not in her lifetime.
Abstract losses and the occasional slip up he can handle, but knowing he abandoned her for two years to one of the bloodier revolutions in human history is another matter.
It wouldn’t be Gallifrey. Or the Fourth Great and Bountiful. No uncorrectable loss in the face of odds too incalculable to contemplate.
It would be his own mistake, and the cost of remedying it could have consequences for a galaxy and untold future centuries. Reapers. Paradoxes. Countless iterations based on her presence in the timeline.
Not to mention a certain Doctor with a blue suit and a young Miss Martha Jones.
But it could be done. Erased. If she asked.
She’s learned so much from him about time, and she knows he would risk these things and more for her if she ever breathed a word.
But she bears no scars. No telltale signs of his little gaffe.
Not on the outside, anyway.
“I lost my phone,” she informs him.
~~~
“Your Time Lord mystique is fading a bit, Doctor.”
“That’s all right. There’s always someone out there who’ll still find me daunting.”
~~~
Sometime later, once she’s finally managed to turn a corner in the TARDIS and not be surprised to find a room or a circuit or a certain face just as she remembered it, Rose spends four hours committing the life she’s lived to paper. Her own unpredictable yet seemingly predestined existence.
And the fact that no matter what becomes of her, the one time she had the power to do absolutely anything, the time where she saw all that would become of both of them, every consequence, she gave them that one short chance to be in love.
Together.
And then gave him back to the manifold futures he safeguards.
She places the letter in the pocket of his old duster in the TARDIS wardrobe, conscious of the innate cruelty of it.
But at the same time Rose knows that someday he’ll make the connection on his own. That’s who he is. And she wants her words to be there when he does. When he and Martha return to find that Rose Tyler has integrated herself back into the timeline.
To find that she’s only a memory.
It’s no surprise to her that she’ll be gone someday. She wonders at the how and when.
Old and grey or young and fighting.
And when she’s at her most desperate to hope for old age and fond memories, she remembers the words of the Beast and she thinks that she might not have it in her to survive this in silence after all.
“I forgot to ask,” comes the sheepish admission from behind the last Time Lord’s smile. She turns to find him peering in at her, no doubt wondering at the unaccountably tearful brown eyes.
“Well?” asks the love of Rose Tyler’s life. “How was the holiday?”
She smiles, forever banishing a hundred horrid recollections from her mind and replacing them with the future her friends died to make and the singular joy of her life at his side. It’s the one “forever” she knows she’ll manage somehow.
“Good time, that.” Rose replies.
~~~
“Tell me about Rose, Doctor. Tell me how she died.”
“She didn’t, my dear Ms. Jones. Not in this world.”
~~~