Rose Tyler had always been wary of the night sky.
As a little girl, her mother had once taken her on holiday to somewhere in the countryside - she couldn't remember where now. She would never forget the moment she wandered outside, pigtails flapping in the quiet, restless night breeze, and bothered to look up.
The stars kissed the folds of the clouds and stared with big eyes down from an unfathomable height, a distance she couldn't even imagine. Suddenly it occurred to her, six years old, that everything above her was empty space. The darkness above her went on, and on, and on, further than anyone would ever go. She could almost touch the ceiling of her bedroom if she jumped on the bed, and she thought that was an achievement.
But as she stood there, looking up, it came upon her just how big the sky was. It wasn't an intellectual understanding - she wasn't capable of that kind of understanding - but a sense of depth, a sense of cold and dark and infinite distance, and slowly, a realization that broke upon her tiny world. She grasped, in that moment, the concept of infinity.
She learned, later on, that every human had that realization at some point or another. Most ran away. They hid in their routines and their jobs and their "lovely beans on toast," as someone had once called it. Some went mad, and spent the rest of their lives trying to prove that the world was flat and the sky only a few miles deep.
And some were inspired. She was one of those lucky, cursed few. In that moment, when she stood there, looking up, she felt some deep and whispered voice stirring in the very core of her, sending ripples all though her body and down into her toes. She could feel the air trembling with a secret call, coming from above, urging her forward into infinity. Her legs strained against the bounds of gravity and time, longing to run, run, run into fields where nebulas played like horses, fly along the secret paths of the universe and whisper into the ears of the mad and the brilliant, like Time and Space herself.
From that moment onward, she knew that the night sky was dangerous for her. It was like a drug, enticing yet so forbidden, that she would steal out when she was supposed to be sleeping to imbibe more of. It made her feel urges and desires she knew she would never satisfy, and more importantly, it made her feel. Nothing else in the world woke her up to quite such a state of excited, breathless anticipation, where she could feel every atom in her body trembling with infinite energy and potential. Not even sex, and God knows she'd tried.
Rose knew from a very young age what death meant. As a child, her father breathed in every doorway and every bedtime story and every look in her mother's eyes. The way Jackie Tyler's eyes would look when she thought about Pete were the only thing that came close to the depth of the night sky. She understood, even then, that the tragedy of death wasn't about the moment of the loss. It was every day and year after that. It wasn't a thing, it was an absence. Yet it filled up so much space in her life, and she was as comfortable and familiar with it as with her own mother. Death never frightened her. She never said it out loud, for fear of being dragged off to a mental institution, but dying had always seemed like the biggest adventure she was ever going to have.
Her mother stopped working the moment Rose was old enough to hold a job. Jackie Tyler was depressed, half of London knew it. But she never did. It was always Rose's fault. Rose was supposed to take care of her in her old age, she'd always said so. So Rose worked. She worked from the time she was fifteen, and it was never the breathless independence it was for other children her age. She learned to hate work like she hated life. Life was a succession of moments that meant nothing.
She went through life feeling nothing. This was the thing she was always afraid to say, even much later when she had the man who would never judge her for anything. For the first nineteen years of her life, she didn't feel. Looking back, she realized that she had never in her life felt anger. She had never felt joy. She had never felt sorrow. And she had never felt love. It was amazing how easy it was to never even notice the difference. Most people actually felt more comfortable around her than other people. They expressed it to her, but they never knew why. But she knew. It was because she was empty. There was no conflict with her, no need to get into emotional messes, because she couldn't care less. She was empty.
She had never felt quite... awake. She went through life as if in a dream. She woke up, made breakfast, went to work, made lunch, came home, made dinner, and went to bed, like clockwork. And all throughout the day she socialized, flirted, chatted, laughed at people's jokes and listened to their problems, gave out hugs where they were needed, entertained, mingled, and trivialized. Not a one of those moments touched her in any meaningful way. She knew how to get people to like her, and she wanted to be liked, but she wasn't sure why.
There were a few exceptions. Her mother was one. Jackie meant a great deal to her, and she would always be there to wipe away tears, make chicken soup, and marvel at the incredible depth in her mother's eyes. Mickey was another. He was her only real friend, and he had been there for her since she was little.
"Hey, spacey!" She turned around, seven years old, her pigtails exchanged for tight braids, to identify the source of the voice.
A boy perched on a railing, apple in his hand. He'd just thrown a rock at her. She ignored him, turned her head back and kept walking. He didn't bother her.
The boy hopped off the railing and began trailing behind her, bouncing the apple on his palm. "You hear me, space case? What's wrong with you?"
The young Rose failed to even quicken her pace. There were very bad people around the Estates, and she saw them every day and exchanged greetings. They didn't frighten her. She had no concept of what it was to be afraid.
Her lack of fear only made her a prime target. The boy, who was at least eleven, grabbed her from behind and forced his hand over her mouth. She couldn't scream.
Suddenly the boy's mouth opened in surprise, and he crumpled to the ground, leaving her free. She turned, her braids bouncing, to see a grinning kid about her own age who had just hit the older boy with a brick.
"He's a meanie," the new kid pronounced, his dark eyes bright under his small green hoodie. "So I hit him!" He appeared to realize that she was staring at him with wary eyes. "I'm Mickey," he introduced himself. He put out a hand. She stared at it like he was offering her a spider.
The boy began to stir under them, patting his blood-encrusted head. Mickey grabbed her hand. "Let's get outta here!" They ran, across the cracked concrete and away from that place, a special potion of blood and adrenaline and companionship pounding in their ears, and for the first time in her life, Rose felt love.
It was a child's crush at best, but it was more real emotion than she had ever felt. For the first few days and weeks of it, she lived on a high that rivaled heaven. He became her new drug. She couldn't get enough of this feeling.
It faded soon enough. But Mickey became her closest companion, and stayed that way for her entire early life. He was the only person she could feel friendship for. Her inner circle of one.
Until a man unlike any other, with bottomless eyes and a smile as bitter and sweet as reality, with all the distant, untouchable beauty of a shooting star and brimming with all the love she couldn't feel, with the sheer power of an Earth-ending meteor crashed into her life and turned the world upside down, so that her feet were in the sky and she could finally run free.
Hi there! If you're still reading this, you clearly like sappy love poetry trying to pretend it's a real story. :) Great, so we'll get along. Romantics are an endangered species nowadays, and we gotta stick together.
This is actually my second try at this story. My first was called Bad Wolf Rising, and if you want to find it... don't. I deleted it for good reason.
If you liked it, please review! I'd love to hear what you liked about it, so I can feel warm and fuzzy. If you didn't like it, I want your reviews even more. Please, please send me constructive criticism! Constructive criticism is the reason this story exists. Sometimes I feel like it's the reason I exist. So please, bring it on!
I should warn you right off the bat: I'm not the most reliable updater. There will be updates. I'm not one of those writers who just trail off in the middle of a story and disappear, never to be heard from again. If I get sick of a story, I'll let you guys know. However, sometimes those updates can take months at a time, so be prepared.
I'm looking forward to taking this journey with you! Welcome aboard! Don't get left behind, don't ask stupid questions, and don't wander off. Geronimo!