Disclaimer: I am not pretending to own Doctor Who or any of its characters. I am not making money with this story, just writing for fun. :)
Warnings: Contains spoilers for Journey's End.
She often found herself staring at clocks: watches, stopwatches, grandfather clocks--she'd watch them all, mesmerized by the movement of the second hand, letting her breaths and heartbeats become syncopated with it. She held the slim white gold watch her mum and Pete bought her for Christmas and remembered when she really did have the power of time at her hands, when things like minutes and hours, days, months, and years didn't matter. The mysteries of the future were cleared for her, the questions of the past answered as easily as walking through an open door.
People tried to simplify time. They believed it to be straight and linear--simple cause and effect, action after action--when really it was twisted and contorted and confusing and brilliant and wonderful and never what you think.
And it couldn't be contained in something so insignificant as a watch.
She had dreams sometimes, not her usual nightmares of Daleks and Cybermen and blank, empty walls and lonely beaches, but dreams that burned in a gold light. Eternity was stretched out in front of her, and it was sad and it hurt but it was so, so beautiful and if only she could reach out and touch it then everything would be alright and--
The day and the night…the sun and the moon…
All that was, all that ever could be…
"I create myself."
--and she'd wake up, gasping and frightened, tears wet and warm on her face and the memory of the dream fading, slipping from her consciousness like it was never there.
She'd watch people go by on the street, hundreds of people who let their lives be controlled and scheduled by a system of numbers, by a simple wooden box with simple metal cogs and hands, and who never knew that it could be different, that it could be better. She'd watch them and she'd ask herself, how could she possibly go back to being one of them? How, when she once had control of time itself, could she go back to being controlled by it?
She felt trapped here in this alternate universe where everything was too much the same, too much like the world she knew before blue boxes and space ships and freedom and adventure and his hand in hers as they ran ran ran through time itself.
She didn't think she could stand it, staying in one place, letting her life pass by slowly, heartbeat by heartbeat, second by second.
And then she was back on a familiar beach, and his hand was in hers again and for days after she would watch him, taking in the familiar hair and face and expressions, and the not so familiar words that would sometimes come out of his mouth, the extra lines on the skin around his eyes and mouth that she knew weren't there before. She watched him as he gazed at the clocks, eyes fixed on the second hand, letting his breaths and heartbeat become syncopated with it. And he would turn to her and smile, and it was sad and it hurt but it was so, so beautiful and she wanted to reach out and touch it and then maybe everything would be alright--
He was leaving her here again, in this place she hated so much, and his eyes were sad and so shuttered, those extra lines around his mouth deep and he looked so much older than she remembered him as the other him bent down and whispered in her ear. And then her hands were on his jacket, mouth on his mouth and their lungs breathed the same air, heart beat the same beat and it was a beginning to something new and yet the end of something old and loved and treasured and never, ever forgotten.
Rose Tyler…
"I love you."
--and it was, eventually.
With time.