The air of the night is cold, she can feel its bite as she flexes her fingers, clenches her hands into fists.
The smile about his lips is as she remembers, but sadder; it was always sad, but part of her was young enough to deceive herself into thinking it wasn't. He hasn't changed – of course. He is like their love and like the pain of his parting, he is what she is not, what she will never be. Immortal.
"Hello, Rose," saying her name is joy and agony together. She reads him without effort.
Rose has thought hundreds of times, of what she would tell him, if given a chance, if he had not disappeared the way he had, so fast and sudden, a second time and still, with no goodbye at all.
"How could you let me go?" She says – can think of saying nothing else. There is no need for an introduction.
It's the middle of the night. The man she loves – that other man, who looks just like him, but older now, just like she is – is asleep in their bedroom. Rose was not sleepy tonight. She could feel, from the pit of her soul, from the marrow in her bones, that it was coming, that he was near, could think of nothing but those two words uniting them across the universe – bad wolf.
They are both standing in the backyard, lit only by the moonlight and the lamp she hasn't switched off in the corridor. There is such a solemn air to his sadness. As if he's a knight who did everything out of devotion – even deserting her. But she's no queen, and maybe his allegiance was never hers. Tonight, though, she can't think that, because of that look in his eyes and how it still mourns everything that they've shared, all that they've hoped for, and she knows better.
"It had to be this way," he says.
"Really?" She snaps. She probably shouldn't, but anger is rising from so deep within her, from so many years, that she's powerless to stop it. "Was it one of those immutable laws of time you had to preserve?"
"No." There is no resent and, she notes, no shame in his answer.
"I didn't think so." She says.
Shock is threatening her composure a bit – what it feels like, to see him, after all those years, him, the one that is gone… There is only one man that Rose Tyler loves and she has lost him forever. That same one and only shares her bed and will grow old with her. You wouldn't know how that feels like, you wouldn't think that it's possible – for there to be two versions of the same love, the one that she lives with and the one she loses.
"But I didn't ask why," she resumes. Pain is not yet getting the best of anger, she won't let it. She'll have time, alone, to grieve him again, his presence is a privilege she cannot waste, and he deserves to see that she resents him, that she resents what he did to himself – to them both. "I asked, how?"
"I'm a time lord, Rose. The kind of life I lead isn't for humans – not in the long term. To be with me, you would have suffered my changes and been exposed to all those risks –"
"I knew about the risks when I went with you. I chose them when I chose you."
"You chose a life unnatural for your kind."
The words open a black hole beneath her feet, as if the ground were crumbling. It feels like falling, to hear him speak like this, so cold with reason.
Rose thinks of his hands on her body when they were dancing. She thinks of the look he sometimes got in his eyes when she wondered if he would let her kiss him.
They are both silent for a little while.
From an invisible, eternal dimension, Rose is still falling.
"There were so many things," he says, "that you would have wanted, that I couldn't give you. Children. An ordinary life –"
"You don't know," she cuts him off, "the things I wanted."
Apparently, he didn't. The look on his ageless face is getting heated now. Good. She wants him to be angry, too. "He could give you all that. He could love you and marry you and spend all of his life with you."
"Why couldn't you?"
"You know how it is, Rose. You follow me, go into my world, I don't go into yours."
"Yes," she says, smiling, from a victory that's breaking her heart. "That's what this is really about, isn't it, Doctor? It's not that I couldn't choose you, that I couldn't leave my humanity behind for you. It's that you couldn't choose me."
"You don't know." She hears the warning in his tone. "You don't understand, Rose, how it would have hurt you in the end –"
"It's not me you did it for." Before he disappears again tonight, vanishes in the infinity of the world where she can no longer follow, she hopes that she will have at least convinced him of that. "I would have gone to the end of the world for you. I would have sold my soul for you."
All he answers is, "Exactly."
She doesn't care, how practical he sounds. She'll get through that cold surface he wears like an armor, if she has to hammer it out of him. It's been years, probably, since he's achieved enough dispassion to believe he's immune to her. I'll show you, she thinks. We'll see, if I am the only one of us both with human feelings.
"The man you left me with," she says, the mortal version of him, "he gives me everything you wouldn't give me." His jaw clenches imperceptibly. "And I give him everything I would have given you, everything you never cared enough to take."
"Rose," he warns.
"Would it have been so bad?" She says. "To play house with me, to lower your great self to human standards –"
"You speak of things you don't understand."
"So do you." The cold helps steel her towards stolidity. She won't cry, this time, until he does. "Didn't you want me?"
The look on his face hardens. "It isn't about what I wanted. It's about what you deserved."
"And what I wanted?"
This time, he is pleading. "Rose –"
"I chose a name for him." She interrupts. She wants him to know about this, wants him to think of this after he's gone. "He looks so much like you, it's strange to call him anything but 'Doctor' – of course, it isn't the right name. It isn't yours. You would never tell me yours, nor anything that mattered."
He says nothing. Dismayed now, he has lost his sword, and she is stripping away his shield. He's showed her no mercy when she was powerless, but perhaps she will – she does not want to be cruel to him. Cruel was never what she wanted.
She takes a step towards him, cool, determined where he is faltering. "Say it now," she demands.
"What?"
"You know what."
It would be more merciful to let him be, let certain things remain unspoken, for him. After this is over, she'll have the man she loves to go home to, while he will be alone to mend the wounds that she's reopened. But she doesn't care. He chose to be alone.
"Is this about what I deserve," she says, "or is this about your pride? Because I deserve for you to say it, don't I? I think that when a girl loves a man enough to leave her whole life behind, she deserves to hear that he loves her back."
"You know the truth, Rose. You always have."
"That excuses you for being a coward?"
He kisses her before she has time to stop him. She wouldn't have stopped him, apparently, because within a minute she is gliding her hand around his neck and kissing him back, clamping him close to her as if his proximity were the evidence he would never leave.
"How much time have we got?" She asks, catching her breath, when he is kissing her neck and collarbone.
"I don't know." He answers. Are they burning a hole in the universe, wasting away stars or a whole galaxy, to stretch their love across dimensions, for a few more minutes? "Not much."
She slips a hand beneath his shirt, touches his skin so that she'll remember his warmth, when he's disappeared.
"I love you," he says, before she needs to ask again, and she steps back to look at him when he does – the worship in his eyes is burning with grief and buried ardor, so that she knows that, for a few seconds, it has not mattered, what species they belonged to, that they might never see each other again. She, too, is forever.
Rose is still reeling from what he said so that, when he starts to fade beneath her fingers, she can think of nothing to say. It is too quick, like it was the first time, and soon all that's left is the ghost of his warmth, the taste of him in her mouth.
She doesn't fall to her knees and cry like she did before, she does not beg the universe to open up and give him back. But those heartbroken prayers echo, so loud, across her mind, that her silence makes no difference.
Rose stands silent, in the garden, and looks up patiently at the sky. I would have been his forever, she thinks. He didn't ask. He didn't have to.
After a moment, and still no tears, Rose goes back inside, goes home to the man that she loves – but to the shedding of silent tears on her pillow, for what is left of the night, it's the one she's lost that's on her mind.