Settling
Sometimes you have to settle for second best because there's nothing else left. Sometimes, there's not even a second best…sometimes, nothing else would ever be enough.
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Jackie settled for Pete because he was the closest thing she'd ever have to the man she loved. He wasn't quite right, but he would do, and she found that there was room in her heart to love them both as two separate men.
He was a little colder, she thought, and it was so hard to deal with a man who looked just like her Pete but so obviously wasn't. Then she realised it was all bravado, alldefences – something she wasn't prepared for because her Pete had never usedput on an act– and once she broke them down she saw that, essentially, he was the same man inside. Success, money and confidence had changed him but at his very core, he was the Pete Tyler she fell in love with all those years ago.
The first Pete Tyler, who got her name wrong at their wedding and couldn't tell a cartoon from the evening news, was gone but this man was here in his stead, more than willing to fill the gap left behind. 'Taking his place' wasn't the way it worked – that gap never would be quite filled in, that distance never quite bridged and they both knew it, but Jackie's second Pete went a lot further to bridging it than anyone else ever had done. When she was with him, she could sometimes forget that the other was dead. Never being able to have her real husband back, she could quite happily settle for this one.
Plus he was rich. Not that she cared about that, of course.
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Pete settled for Jackie because he desperately needed someone to hold onto, more than he would ever let anyone know, and he missed his wife. Before the events at Torchwood, his wife had been out there somewhere, one of the Cybermen marching through his world and ruthlessly killing his people. Perhaps that was the worst thing; not being able to move on because she wasn't truly dead. Employing the distant, hard attitude which soon became second nature to him, insisting that the Cybermen were just machines, was all he could do to cope.
But then she was sucked into the Void. Or maybe she was killed by a Dalek. Maybe she was gone a long time before any of the crossing-over happened, destroyed in the explosion at Lumic's factory more than three years ago. Whatever happened, finally, finally he could think of her without wondering who she had killed that day; which life had been ruined or extinguished at her cold, metal hands. Finally, he could remember her as Jackie Tyler, his rather argumentative wife with a fondness for dogs and champagne, and he could settle into a new life.
This Jackie hadn't been his 'Jacks' and never would be, but he found in time that he grew to love her for her little differences. He could easily settle for differences. More than anything, he grew to love the little boy his Jackie never provided him with and, in turn, the mother for being different and letting it happen.
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Little Jimmy Tyler, though he couldn't be called lonely, certainly wanted a role-model. He settled on Jake as an adoptive brother because Mickey was always busy wanting something he couldn't have. His sister Rose stayed in Norway a lot, a long way from home. For work, she said, but he thought he understood more than she gave him credit for. He was the only boy in his class who knew where Norway was, but it didn't make him proud because he would rather have his sister than the knowledge. Even when he saw her, she seemed a little lost. Even when she hugged him and smiled, she still seemed empty. She was in the stars, his mum said, with someone she'd loved a long time ago. That's why she looks so sad when you leave her alone to think a bit.
When Rose came home, he made it his mission for thinking to become an impossibility on her part. Though he didn't know it, she was grateful beyond words. She had never wanted to dwell, to sink. In a world where no one understood her, this little boy came closer than anyone. He almost brought her to life in the way he had once done.
She wished she was there for her brother more often, and every now and then she took him to her 'special' beach in Norway where, as he soon learnt, he had to hold her hand very tight to stop her crying. This wasn't a beach for splashing and playing, he decided. It was a beach where it was his job to look after his sister, though she never asked him to. He got the feeling that she needed to be looked after more than he did, and he wondered why she was always alone when she so obviously wanted someone.
She loved him a lot, his mother said, but he went away a long time ago. Sometimes – sometimes I think a bit of her went with him. Jimmy did not, could not, understand feelings of such magnitude, but the explanation was enough. Rose was sad and the responsibility to love was all his because she needed someone to show her it was alright, that they didn't all go away when you got the courage to hold their hands.
Rose, however, wasn't always around for her hand to be held, so he often had to settle for ducks, parks and particle guns with Jake. He found that he didn't really mind, not as long as his sister came back eventually. For now, settling was easy.
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Jake settled for Mickey as a friend, a colleague, a brother. He wasn't Ricky, but he learnt to be brave and Jake learnt to overcome grief and embrace hope. It was strange, looking at a different man with the same face – especially one who was so obviously lost to love when Ricky would never have done such a thing – but it got easier over time. Once or twice, he even thought Mickey was the nicer person, the better man, and he hated himself for it. How do you mourn for a friend when you're dealing with someone who looks and acts almost exactly like them every day?
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Mickey settled for Sarah, a pretty young primary school teacher from London, because she wasn't Rose. He gave up trying to find someone like her a long, long time ago – he knew no one would ever measure up and suddenly saw why Rose needed the Doctor so much, why she could never return to him.
If nothing else, it was incentive to move on with his life in a way he never had before. Oh, he had fought the Cybermen and worked for Torchwood and, he suspected, grown a few inches taller in the process, but he had never let go of her. The hardest lesson he ever had to learn was the way that, even though you haven't given up, you still have to move on. You still have to settle for something – for someone – new. But, true to form, he learnt it well. Sarah's biggest ambition was to get the children in her class to spell the word 'banana' correctly. Thoughts of stars and space never entered her head, which is why she was enough.
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Rose had done enough settling in her life. She'd settled for chips, and no A-Levels, and nineteen years without a father. A job in a shop, a grubby comprehensive school, the same pub every Friday night.
She could have found someone else, but she didn't want to settle anymore.
He never will, so I can't.