Written for the New Who Fic Olympics on Tumblr.
Representing USA Eleven/Rose section in the Junior Ski Jump.
Chapter 1 of 2
Sparks flew from the lever, and the Doctor's hearts sank.
"Offline."
No.
Before his rather impressive brain could figure out how to get him across the room without being sucked in, Rose was already way ahead of him.
No, not like this.
He watched and all he could do was hold tighter to his clamp, praying to every deity he knew that she would be able to get the lever back up and hang on.
"Online and locked."
"Rose, hold on!" he shouted, pleaded even.
But he knew. Oh, he knew.
He was having a hard enough time hanging on himself and he still had his arms around the clamp and his feet on the ground while she was hanging on by her fingertips.
And then, she wasn't.
"Rose!"
He let go of his clamp and started hurtling towards her, but it was too late. She disappeared into the light just as the portal started warping and closed right in front of his face, leaving him to slam into the wall at a speed that would have seriously hurt a human but only stunned him.
He slid down the wall and just stayed there, not daring to move in the hopes that this wasn't real.
It couldn't be real.
This couldn't have happened.
He couldn't have let this happen.
No.
It only took a few seconds of lying there before he sprang to his feet with determination and rushed back to his TARDIS.
He could rip the portal back open. He could. No matter if it would let all the daleks and cybermen back out, as long as he had Rose back it didn't matter.
He would go personally kill every single one if he had to.
He could do this.
Except, he couldn't.
Not even with the power that he got from orbiting the largest supernova he could find was enough to open the portal back up since he had done such a good job of making sure it it would seal itself up tight.
Even the TARDIS manual was not able to help him and when the pages finally gave up and just started literally telling him it was impossible, he opened the TARDIS doors and chucked it right into the heart of the supernova.
As the doors shut, he turned back around, slowly starting to realize that it was hopeless. There was no way of opening the portal again that wouldn't rip apart the entire universe and it wouldn't be much help to Rose if there was nothing for her to come back to because he had destroyed it all.
And if he was very, very honest with himself, he knew there was no way she would still be alive anyway. She would have disintegrated immediately after going into the void even though it would have felt like forever to her.
That thought, of her being alone, afraid, and probably in pain, caused his stomach to churn with guilt but as he turned away from the doors he noticed a woman in a wedding dress standing by his console.
"What?"
It was hot and cold, light and dark all at once. It felt like time was flying by but could have been standing still for all Rose knew.
She remembered falling into the void and so thats where she assumed she was now. It felt like she had been there a while already, but she wasn't sure. This place was so weird. It felt like everything and nothing was happening all at once.
Cybermen and Daleks surrounded her but they either didn't care or didn't know that she was there and slowly-or maybe quickly- they each started to disappear until she was the only one left.
With a choked scream that was both deafeningly loud and silent at the same time, she started disappearing too.
When the daleks and cybermen disappeared it just seemed like they were there and then they weren't, she didn't know that it would hurt this bad. It felt like little tiny pieces of her were being ripped apart.
It hurts, Doctor, it hurts.
Her thoughts were a chaotic mess but the Doctor was always a constant in her mind. She just hoped that, somehow, he would be able to get past this and not blame himself for this.
The world would go on without Rose Tyler, but she wasn't sure how long the world would have gone on without the Doctor to save it if he had gotten sucked in instead.
Doctor…
She could feel it, she was almost gone. She wasn't sure if she still had a body anymore, it was just that everything was in pain.
There was just one last thing she had to say, even if he would never get to hear it.
"Doctor, I-"
love you.
Darkness and silence reigned as the last being in the void slipped away, a smile on her face from her final thoughts.
And then, there was light.
Rose gasped and her lungs burned with air that didn't exist as memories from the Game Station flooded into her head, allowing her to remember everything she had forgotten about that day. The golden light that had shot out of her body started to recede until her skin was just faintly glowing as the last bits of her memory clicked into place and two words came to mind.
Bad Wolf.
She didn't know how much more of this she could take. It was the same thing over and over again. Bad Wolf would bring her back, only to have her disintegrate sometime later.
Funny thing, disintegrating never got any less painful and she was tired of it. There was no way out, she had tried anything and everything she could think of- which was, admittedly not much- but there was no end or even really a beginning to this place.
There was no hope of her ever getting out so what was the point of this continual cycle? It was just survival instinct kicking in that was causing this… regeneration? She wasn't sure what to call it as it wasn't quite like the Doctor's regenerations, she didn't change appearance or anything, she just came back.
If she didn't have the constant presence of the golden light of Bad Wolf in her mind to keep her company she would have driven herself insane long ago. And even though she wasn't exactly sure they were still separate anymore it had it's limits. Bad Wolf had the power to see everything before, but there just wasn't anything to see or feel in the Void.
Everything existed in the void but nothing did as well. Everything was distorted and nothing made sense so all she could see with Bad Wolf was the equivalent of white static noise.
Only worse, much worse.
And she was so tired of it all. With no hope of anything ever being any different, she just wanted to be done.
Suddenly there was something brushing against and seeking out Bad Wolf so she took the chance and grabbed on tight, not willing to let this miracle of a chance go.
It had been a long time since she had bothered actually opening her physical eyes- because really, there wasn't any point- but when she did this time, there was an older man with white hair in a very worn out leather coat standing in front of her looking confused and vaguely angry.
"Who are you?" They both asked at the same time. Rose could feel the man trying to pull away from her mental grip but she was holding tight.
"Let me go," the man said just as Rose pleaded, "Take me with you!"
"I can not. I was only searching for an interface that would be pleasing for this user. It would be impossible for this form to pull you from here, even if I wished to do so," the man said in an uncaring voice that did not seem to suit him at all.
Rose sighed but tried not to look as defeated as she felt. "Well, you can at least stay and talk to me for a mo'. I've been here for so long, I think, by myself so tell me about you. Like what's with that old leather coat? It's about time to put it to rest, don'tcha think?"
"This is the form of my user. I do not have a 'myself' I am the interface of a weapon that has been placed in storage for centuries," the man stopped, looking as if he just thought of something, " and it is time for me to go."
"Wait!" Rose cried out, trying to physically grab onto him when he forcibly broke the mental grip she had on him and turned away, "Please! Please take me with you! I can't be here anymore. I just can't."
He turned back around and looked back at her, " I can not."
One step backwards was all it took for him to disappear and she started to feel the familiar pain of disintegration.
No more. I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry, but please, please just let me go this time. I can't do this.
As she closed her eyes, she started thinking about all the time she had spent with the Doctor, wanting to remember every bit of it right until the end.
She remembered seeing his horrified face when the lever started to fail just as she felt her mind grow darker and darker, knowing that this time she wasn't going to be brought back by golden light.
Goodbye, Doctor-
"Weeeeeeeeeeeellllll," golden light flared back to life as the tone of that voice caused her to immediately think of the Doctor even though that voice was definitely not his. In fact, it really sounded like…
She opened her eyes again and saw herself standing in front of her wearing some god awful combination of old and ratty clothes.
"I lied, a bit. It's not that I can't save you, it's just that I didn't really want to. Never been much fond of humans so I didn't really care about one little human stuck in the Void but I've been in your head and I've been in his. I've seen what could and what should happen and I'm giving you a choice. You can stay here and perish, or I can bring you out but there will be… conditions and I must warn you, your future will not be easy." The rag wearing Rose spread her arms out wide and continued, "So, Rose Tyler, what will you choose?"
She knew absolutely nothing about this person other than the fact that it had to be the same person as the man from earlier so the choice was obvious, right?
The console flickered in warning and the Doctor quickly shouted, "Clara, grab onto something. We're going down!"
Clara had just enough time to grab the railing before the TARDIS seemed to lose all power and plummeted out of the vortex.
"What's going on?" Clara yelled as the Doctor frantically pulled levers and flipped switches, trying to get the TARDIS back online.
"I don't know! It's like shes rerouting the power somewhere. Where! Where are you taking the power to?"
He slammed his hands on the console just as the power came back on just in time to stop them from crashing. Once the console screen was back up he could see just where the power had been rerouted too.
"The attic!"