Title: "Happy Birthday"
Author: Wish Wielder
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing / Character Focus: Rose Tyler, Pete Tyler; Pete/Rose familial
Challenge / Series: N/A
Theme / Prompt: N/A
Word Count: 835
Rating: K Plus / PG
Summary: It's not the first year she's missed it, but it is the first year she hadn't wanted to.
Notes / Spoilers: Post-Doomsday/pre-S4, during the first year in Pete's World.
Disclaimer: "Doctor Who" and all respective properties are © the BBC. Megan D. (Wish Wielder) does not, has never, nor will ever own "Doctor Who".
This fic is dedicated to John W.D., who would have been 59 today. Fifteen years and you're still missed every bit as you were the first. Love you.
"Happy Birthday"
It's not the first year she's missed it.
After all, she's had twenty-one of them fly by, so what's a twenty-second? When she was a baby, still little enough to not really know what it meant, Mummy would dress her up in her prettiest dress and off they'd go. The first year they had a picnic by his side, Mummy talking and laughing and crying as she tried to catch him up on everything he'd missed since…and she would sit there, just a baby with no idea what was wrong but knowing that she didn't like the keening noise coming from her mummy.
She was barely two and she knew what a broken heart felt like.
The next year they stood in the cold, and she was quiet because she didn't know how else to be. Mummy talked to a man she couldn't see, and she smiled and cried and – when she told her to go back with Cousin Mo, to leave her be for a bit, when she thought she couldn't hear – she screamed. And it went on, year after year, each year shorter than the last until finally she was old enough to decide for herself.
She was nine when she decided she didn't want to celebrate (didn't even want to go there) anymore. Celebrations were happy, and their trips were anything but. She stayed behind and Mum went alone, and she went alone every year after until she was seventeen. At seventeen she went and she cried, and she told him about Jimmy and how she had ruined her life and oh, how she was so glad he wasn't there anymore because if he was he'd be so very ashamed. She cried until she had no tears, and with a kiss to the cool ground she had gone home.
At nineteen she hadn't remembered, but when she had – when she had knelt next to the him she'd never known and held his hand as her worst memories relived before her – she had cried again. She was with the Doctor then, and he had told her it was all right. That it was better than going to the old cemetery, because she had been there for him when he'd needed her most. So it came and past, and she didn't think on it again – and then she'd met the other him, out in this other world. And then she died.
So it wasn't that it was the first year she'd missed it; it was anything but. It just happened to be the first year that she really cared she was.
She was expected to be at the manor, celebrating with so many others the birthday of Pete Tyler. She was expected to say something, not quite a speech but close enough, in honor of this man. Rose Tyler didn't exist in this world, but B. Smith did; poor orphaned Bee, taken in by her 'Uncle Pete' and 'Aunt Jackie', given a home when hers had been lost. That was their story to this world, but when the cameras and figureheads were away it was supposed to be Mum, Dad, and Rose. The world expected Bee to be there for Uncle Pete's birthday; Jackie expected Rose to be there for Dad's birthday.
And she should be there, right that moment, but instead she was…here. It was nowhere important, not really, but it had been. Once upon a time, a universe away, Pete Tyler – the real Pete Tyler, her Pete Tyler – had been buried here. Now it was a slot occupied by Harry Miller, some poor bloke who had been cyberized at twenty-three. It was just another reminder of how terribly wrong everything was, and as she knelt by the graveside she cried.
Jackie expected her to be at the party to celebrate 'Dad's birthday, but what Jackie couldn't understand was that it wasn't Dad. That man was Pete, but he wasn't Pete. He looked at her, and she caught his eyes, and he wasn't the same man she'd held the hand of after he'd sacrificed his life to save the world. He wasn't the man she used to cry to sleep over, hating him for dying and not being there with them and hating herself even more for feeling that way. He wasn't the one she'd wanted at every recital, every function, every match, every…day. He wasn't the Daddy she'd cried for to chase away the monsters, or the Daddy she'd hated for every father-daughter event she was excluded from because he'd had to die. He wasn't Pete Tyler. He wasn't her Daddy.
And she could smile and pretend and say that yes, Uncle Pete was a great man and she loved him very much, but she couldn't – wouldn't – smile and pretend he was anything close to a father. Not even for Jackie.
It was the twenty-second time his birthday had come and passed, but it was the first time she truly regretted not going to his grave to wish him a happy one.