Title: Reaching Happiness
Author: JazzyMcWier
Words: 481
Summary: An AU for the first season. Yes, I know it's cliched, but I couldn't help myself. I was rewatching the pilot and have always wanted to write a bit about their feelings during the ending, but haven't gotten around to it. This still isn't quite what I wanted from that, but it's fluffy and shippy, so there ye go. :-D
"Okay. See you 'round." She remembers the look on his face, a mere slice of the pain he had felt in his lifetime, the length of hundreds of lifetimes. She remembers the knowledge of a mistake searing through her brain as she stood there, watching him step back inside the TARDIS. She knows it was the wrong thing to say, the worst decision she had made, to stay still as he switched switches and pulled levers and she remembers helping Mickey up, out of his shock, leading him in the direction of home or a pub, feeling a strange emptiness she had never known was there, sitting in the middle of her stomach cavity, that had nothing to do with not eating all day. She had turned towards the road, pulling Mickey away from the alley, and she had never turned back, staring forward, knowing she would never see him, this strange man, this Doctor, again. And she had felt such loss.
"By the way, did I mention, it also travels in time?" But he came back. And she had never felt such happiness. Never, in all her nineteen worldly years (or so she had thought of herself) had she felt so elated, seen with such perfect clarity her road, her path through the future. Seeing worlds and times long forgotten or to be known showed her the luxury of a time traveler's life, while watching in agony as her Doctor sacrificed Salt Lake City to the Daleks for her showed her the cruelty of such a life. At one point, early on in their adventures, he had asked if, now that she knew how dangerous it could be, she wanted to go home. She had told him that she didn't know, that she was confused, overwhelmed, but she had known all along; no, she hadn't wanted to leave him. Not then, not now, not ever.
"I could save the world, but lose you." Well, they'd been wrong once again…It was bound to happen now and again. She'd thought that there was no time or place or event that could bring her such joy as when he came back for her, but this surely tops all. He'd saved the world, her world and others, and had still been unsure of keeping her around. If he hadn't been convinced then, he was now. Standing weakly in the doorway, Rose Tyler watches her Northern Doctor, twisting the slightly ornate ring in her fingers, as he shuffles back and forth on the carpeted floor, a bundle of what at first glance appears to be rags. But he's talking to rags, as comfortable as he would talk to her or the three-headed people of Jinghang, and the bundle of rags giggles back softly, cooing and reaching to touch his wrinkled forehead. And she now knows that there is a happiness she had never reached before.