i. just a poetic tragedy.

"Not a sign. No one here's seen him in a month…hasn't been a call in three weeks. I thought you of all people would know-I'm starting to worry." The captain told the flower, voice just below bitter, transposing revelation over airwaves and telephone wire, tangled.

"That's what I was afraid of. Thank you and…I'm sorry." Plastic cutting a sound sharp in the empty air, connection buried in the landline.

A cocktail of directions blended word of mouth and six miles of sludge on sneakers later, she bloomed across a damp and dusty doorstep, checking the faded numbers cast in amber light along the frame, fidgeting with the zipper splitting the front of her blue jumper. Eating nerves on the exhale, she closed her eyes and knocked three times.

"Hullo?" Green paint scratched along half rotted wood folded back to reveal a withered woman held half a head shorter, mossy eyes polished and peeking from behind half-moon spectacles. "I ain't never seen th'likes of you around these parts—not much of anyone new, to be fair…" she sighed with the semblance of a smile. "Anyway, whatchu here for dearie?"

The girl swallowed, honeysuckle hair tucked behind her ear. "Uhm, I was looking for a…for a friend of mine whats supposed to be livin' up in your top room. Tall, skinny bloke, a bit...odd? You know anything about him?"

The landlady's smile faded to flatline as she stepped aside, gesturing to the dark wooden stairs tacked to the left wall. "I'd say you got the right place. Go on up—he don't ever answer the door, but it ain't ever locked either… It's like he's waitin on something." Someone.

Someone.

One nod, then rubber on wood, creaking and a shipwreck heart.

Knock,

Knock,

Knock,

Knock.

"About time…." Familiar voice shot storm clouds through her lungs, the absence heard heavy in the empty intonation tugging tight her hurricane heart. "It's open…I knew you'd be coming."

One more motion of a prayer upon her lips, a deep breath, and she tore the handle open.

The flat was hardly a home at all, more a medium small box of hardwood, empty save every inch of surface covered in the ruins of a thousand theories gone sour. There was no bed, just two chairs and a desk crammed into the corner, each littered with all manner of eviscerated electronics and overflowing across the floor—what looked to have been a microwave, half a blender, television, toaster, a fork, spoon, telephone, three computers, and several gutted motors, engines all mismatched into so many new and fantastical contraptions cast across the carpet, propped against shelves. The first thing she noticed.

The second was the walls. Each and any possible inch of space was packed with a hundred different formulas, equations with impossible answers trapped and smeared and stained against the woodwork, carved into the baseboards, drawn in charcoal along the ceiling fan, clouding the blades, unravelling along the floor—

The floor. She hadn't seen him at first, pushed left of center, discarded just lying there down to his shirtsleeves, blue buttoned shirt fastened all wrong, tie hanging over the back of a chair, jacket forgotten beside it. A collection of stains punctuating the wrinkles in the fabric just above the worst of the tatters, edges all torn and frayed even further than the artefact of the man inside of them—a lifeless shape just lying there listless, eyes glazed over and tracing absently the physics etched into the ceiling, open and wide and doing anything but seeing.

A collecting of bottles gleamed empty on the outskirts of the studio, some strewn across the desk atop a million sheets of torn off paper, some strangled down to broken necks and shards caught in the carpet, violence catalogued in every glass discarded and crude cavern punched into the drywall. A bent spoon silver under an empty pack of matches.

"…Doctor?" The name slipped through her lips in reverent horrification, disbelieving. Refusing to accept this man, this marvelous man who walked into danger like a child unafraid, the beginning and end of something beautiful and ancient and timeless, the man who held the universe like day's first and purest drops of dew on his fingertips reduced to something plastered in cold sweat, sightless to the hardwood of a forgotten flat with a mind blown so open into emptiness.

You did this.

She faltered there, every scenario she had formed and imagined in her head, every script self written swept away, knuckles pressed against her lips, nauseous with the weight of it all unfolding lead against her ribcage, pressing out and threatening to snap her every bone brittle.

You.

"Oh, so it's you..? How brilliant…." His head lolled to the side, eyes catching her shape, seeing past her, through her, events unfolding already seen and half lived splayed in her wake set to the sound of rapping on wood.

She looked like so much sunlight, shifting through the cracks- shades more solid than the usual delusion, so solid she could be true and standing there, his favorite girl all pink and blue, enough gravity to wipe the words from the rafters, tear down every hour of progress because none of it really mattered when she was standing there.

But then again, he was dying.

With every lonely heartbeat, dying.

"Rose?"

The levy cracked and she was there, going to her knees nervous next to him, eyes shaking hazel in the glow of a lamp turned over—probably quite a fire hazard, really—hands moving to reach then retracted, unsure. "Yeh, it's me. God…what's happened to you?" she begged across the cloying air, the scent of burnt fuses and spilled bourbon heavy with something half alive and human.

He grumbled something on an exhale, palm pressed into his eye socket before shoving it back through a mess of off-brown hair before he moved languidly to an elbow, sallow face all shadow, groping for the flask dropped a few inches away. "I thought you didn't want to see me." Dismissing her question with a slurred reminder.

"I didn't say that—hey, I think you've had right enough." She intoned, plucking the vessel from his palm, sniffing it. "Ugh, that's terrible—what is it, motor oil?"

He frowned, leaning heavily against the nearest desk leg, nothing more than fever struck eyes bright and grafted to her face. "Ah, well…somethin' to slow it all down a touch." Half a grin, tapping his temple, explanation dragging like a question, voice rusted with disuse and such solo screaming.

She nodded, face just open pages. "Right…" she swallowed, cataloguing the damage. "How, I mean, what for?" she inched closer, cold fingers trailing to his cheekbone, hand cupping his hollow face, bringing him back to focus. "Look at me, Doctor," his opiate eyes finally caught hers, attentive yet still so averted by the deafness behind them. Eyes of an angel and a lover and a friend and a fighter fallen to something mad and frenetic, all overflow and eons empty. Earthly vices pulling him down to a level subhuman, retrograde a slip in the searching of his new skin. She exhaled, steeling herself. "Alright, c'mon, get up-you're comin' with me."

Authority threatening to tremble in her voice, she took his hands and tugged him gently, standing. The contact caused him to blink, snapping back into focus, face too close then far away, detracting, tearing his hands out of hers and fumbling for the table edge. "Mhhmmm, maybe." Head bobbing indecisive, studying a place above her. "But, I s'pose maybe you know how this goes better than I do now." He trailed off, hardly addressing anything in particular.

"I don't know what you're talking about." She drew herself up, forcing her voice firm. "You're not staying here though. This place is poison." She gestured to the mural of broken mathematics, fingertips ghosting the atmosphere of some nonsensical engineering, glimmering like a riddle, unabsolved in the half light, pausing at the desk just to his left, zeroing in on a scattered stack of scribbles.

Not scribbles, sketches.

Gingerly she lifted the stack, brow tightening a fraction, thumbing through. Schematics of the TARDIS, Donna crumbled mindless, a kindly old man, the skyscape of a barren planet dotted with human shapes in the shadow of an explosion, a woman with a gun, Ood huddled in council before the wake of a storm.

A man she didn't recognize broken and laughing and full of murder, notes clouding the page, a skewed score of four note sets strangling the page. A revolver and the eclipsing of a planet.

Her.

Five, ten, fifteen versions of her face, some obscured under calculations, lost and found and drawn over blueprints, embedded in the paper.

"Doctor…what's all this?" she asked, softening, head tilted.

He had been watching her from the corner, somewhere halfway to horror, wary as he unlocked and dialed forward, confiscating the pages with a tight jerk of his wrist, eyes all bright with such deep and terrible darkness. "Sometimes I dream, you know." Words like a corpse shoved under the rug, creeping out the edges, rancid. "And when I dream, it's of dying, and it hurts." Gaunt face, body melting into the wall by the shadows conjoined, he watched her like some animal left to rot and waste.

The girl worried her bottom lip, stepping forward as a lamb to slaughter, hands knotted.

"Every night is just an update from across that wall, every moment that I'm missing while I'm here awake, loud and clear." He stumbled closer, words caught between his teeth, fist clenched around the papers like the wrath of a fallen god, and then he was standing too close, but so far away from anything here but every single deviation of a detail. "'The Doctor' is dead. Somewhere out across space there's a new man with a new face sauntering up out of my corpse, and let me tell you he does not give a damn about Rose Tyler."

So close she could kiss him, like that day those weeks ago on the beach, all impulse before so much confusion, discomfort, betrayal settled back between her lungs, and she agreed when he sent himself away. All to give her the space she asked, time to understand things. To figure it out.

"I died, and now it's all on loop. Every night." He tore away from her, pacing, jaw locked. "Every…" he muttered low to himself, stopped, stumbled, tore the dreamscapes in his hands, letting them fall. "Everything that made me unique, every corner of my mind, every little part of that Doctor you knew is all locked up here—" palm pressing to his sternum, voice dropping like a whisper in the rain. "Held up in this one track heart."

The suggestion of a tear threatened stinging at her eyes, suffocating, searching for the words she needed to help him. Any reassurance she could offer, any way to let him know that it was okay to be afraid, okay to hurt, okay if he wanted to hate her or hurt her or forgive her or to hold anything he felt, as long as he didn't dare think he could just give up.

Her mouth opened, and then she was just there, arms wrapped around to press against his shoulder blades, fists in fabric, the top of her head tucked under his chin, just like it should be, just like it always was except for him just standing there wooden.

Slowly he shifted, tentative and motion like an afterthought, bringing his arms up from where they hung at his sides to tug around her back, holding her close like a man drowning, inhaling the truth of her and the echo of her heart beating against his chest.

"So…how 'bout you come on with me, and we can come back here to get whatever you're working on tomorrow, or, whenever? I think it might be good for you…to get away from it for a while." Stupid girl you know it's the hell inside his head. "I mean, to be around other people, so it's not just you in there, okay?" detracting a fraction, head tilted to the side.

Broken eyes traced the floorboards, then lifted back to hers, the flick of a smile tugging his lips, for her, followed by something like nod, still something tense working in the shadow of his jawbone, profile sharp against the solitary light, downcast.

"Mm, well, good enough. We've got plenty of room at dad's place still—" she started, releasing him, going to the door. He just stood there, focusing on nothing and fading out for a moment, taking a step, dizzy, swaying as the room swam all loud around him, the floorboards creaking closer until—

"Doctor? Oh hell, now…" she rushed back to the man, bonescape body dropped like a stone behind her, out cold, heartbeat steady.

She cursed to herself, digging in her pocket for her mobile, calling a cab in advance. Hanging up, she shifted forward with a sigh, knees tugged to her chest, fingertips absent through his mussed hair. "It's alright, I'm gonna get you home, you great half human space dunce you…." She whispered across the emptiness, the softness of a kiss pressed to his forehead.

Promise.

I couldn't help it, I had to join in on writing for this ship. Next chapter should be up within the next two weeks, so let me know what you guys think in the meantime :]

Song: Poetic Tragedy - The Used

-xo.