Title: Raindrops
Author: Shen
Characters: Rose Tyler
Pairings: Rose/Ten
Word Count: 349
Summary: The rain falls, reminding Rose of her guilt. Post-Journey's End, canon-compliant. Angst.
Rose sits motionless in a cab while rain pounds the roof and sluices over the windows. Thunder cracks as well, but even the din of the storm can't keep her thoughts at bay.
She sighs, leaning her head against the window to look out at the street. Despite that aim, she finds her eyes drawn to the raindrops sliding by just an inch away. Some separate; others crash and combine. There's a metaphor about life here, she thinks.
As one particularly large drop splits into two identical smaller ones, however, she turns away.
The Doctor and… the Doctor. Sort of. For her, for her childish whinging, he had held onto a broken and perfectly replaceable body. True, the exact lines of his face, the curves and planes of his form, the gentleness of those hands were what had been seared into intimate memory. They were what she longed for, upon finding him again. She would have mourned them.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees one of her raindrops slide off the window entirely.
But for exercising her selfishness over his devotion, she's met the most poetic of justice: having to look at that body every day and knowing that its original owner is lost to her, and that she is lost to him.
He is not without blame, and it galls her to think how he ran… but she carries the brunt of the load herself. For creating the entire situation with her bloody human physical attachments.
"Here you are, ma'am."
"Thanks." She pays, exits the car and reaches for her bag.
"Where are you headed?" A pause.
"I don't know yet." Torchwood needs a 900-year-old alien expert more than it requires her. And she? She craves perspective.
Maybe she can be a use to someone out there, if not to the person who is entirely alone, impossibly isolated. The one who needs her most.
She's no longer barricaded in the car, and the water falls heedlessly on her head and shoulders, flows down her cheeks, swaths her limbs in numbing cold.