Chandrasekhar Limit
Rose Tyler is crumbling. She has been for a long, long time now.
If you are foolish enough to find verity in her lies, you would think the pieces started chipping off of her when a white wall and an impossible (yet not quite) void separated her and the perennial Time Lord. But if you are as brilliant as that same Time Lord, you would know that it started long, long ago.
Rose Tyler is a star. She's been told those very same words by prime ministers and slaves, merchants and dancers, Doctor's companions and Dalek specimen, captains and lovers, world-enders and giant faces, soldiers and gingers, both the bad and the good wolves, and that clever, clever Time Lord. Rose Tyler was his star.
But this star was breaking, the weight of planets and galaxies and universes too heavy on her shoulders. Ladies who walk French palaces carried life-threatening axes. Time Heals All Wounds is another lie brilliant people like to believe and Rose Tyler was certainly his brilliant, brilliant precious girl.
She watches from the shadows between realities, watches him flirt and exchange poetry kisses with that tune from a brook, that harmony from a star-splattered stream. Rose Tyler may be the Doctor's precious girl but that woman is his wife.
There was a time long, long ago when she could have pulled him close by blinking but that time is gone, gone, gone. Pandora and The Girl Who Waited made sure of that.
She wants to laugh, that Bad Wolf girl. She's spent half of her life running with him and the other half running back to him when all this time, the Doctor was just plain running away. Rose Tyler watches him for quite a while and sticks around long (long) enough to hear him speak about homework.
Alternating between being Not Really Here and Not Really There is very difficult, Rose Tyler decides. She wishes she never picked up the Dimension Cannon for a second time, even if Meta Crisis ran out of free radicals and Jackie Tyler ran out of tea. The precious girl wants to yell at her Doctor, wants to snog him silly, wants to give him a good slap, wants to give him a forever hug─ but she no longer belonged in any universe. The Bad Wolf left her for a Time Lock, for a Doctor not quite the 8th or the 9th. Her Mickey is also a married man and Captain Jack Harkness is settled down in Cardiff. Rose Tyler didn't cross the void to end up in Cardiff.
Cardiff was easy, easier than being a mindless spectator to angels who weep and silences she can't quite remember clawing for her Doctor. But Rose promised him forever and that is where she's going to be.
There are times when she is sure he could hear her, when River is fast asleep and the Doctor slips away to tinker with the console. She sits on the console chair and tells him about her brother, talking away aimlessly for what felt like hours (but time was relative in the TARDIS) until he laughs at her half-hearted joke. At first, she thinks it was a cruel coincidence but he pushes her.
"You can't stop there, Rose. Does Tony get the banana or what?"
'Good God, he's gone loony.' and Rose begins to cry and continues crumbling. How could he only acknowledge her now, when it was already at the point where she had to choose to go with either a bang or a whimper? Was this his way of telling her to be a supernova, to be as bright as she has always been? Yet all this time she has been a black hole and Rose felt like she never knew anything else.
"Rose? Are you still there?"
"I'm here, Doctor." she hiccups.
"Schrödinger's cat." he says suddenly.
"W-What?"
"I'm…Rose, if I look up from under here, what if you're actually not there?"
"But I really am here, Doctor."
"For how long?"
"Forever, don't you remember?"
"You're lying to me, my precious girl." He's sobbing and tears spring from Rose's eyes again too.
"I lost Amy," the Doctor croaks. "I lost Amy and it hurts, Rose." this Doctor has always been more expressive than Rose's.
"She loved you very much, Doctor."
"So did you."
"That's quite right, yes."
"Rose Tyler, I─ I am an idiot."
Rose can't help it, she laughs. "Quite right too." He laughs as well and Rose knows he's pretending that things never changed. They're still fresh from another encounter with the Weeping Angels and it is Jack, not River, snoring away in one of the bedrooms. Rose can't sleep and the Doctor is more than happy to have her around while he tinkered. They'll only be in the vortex for about half an hour or so before he's punching in coordinates for Niyebe, a planet where everything is constructed out of snowflakes, and she's racing for the wardrobe room to get her jumper and then to the bedroom hall, to wake the captain. But the Doctor's laughs die down and so does the dream, forever is over and Rose Tyler is done crumbling. It's about time Rose Tyler exploded.
The Doctor takes a deep breath. "Will I ever see you again?"
Rose looks away from his still long, long legs and her throat is so tight, like her body is refusing to release these depressing words.
"You can't."
His breath hitches and the Doctor suddenly shifts from longing to curious. "I still don't understand: how are you here? How long have you been here?"
"Handy died, shortly after you left." She knew he would understand just what she was saying. He went through it with the colossal and eternal Donna Noble too. "And then Pete, then Mum, then Tony."
"And you…you're the same?"
"I was meant to be forever."
Her statement was met with silence and she knew he didn't want to ask what came next in the woeful tale. The Doctor wished to remain in the Barcelona chapters, thank you very much.
"Sweetie?" River's voice streamed through the walls of the TARDIS, the ship's way of letting them know that their time was running out. Forever Wolf and the perennial Time Lord were too late.
"Watching you be with her…it hurts." It's her turn to croak and in a flash of a second, the Doctor is up from under the console and kneeling directly in front of her, lips ghosting over where her cheeks and fingers and collarbones would be if she was a little more solid.
"Stay, Rose Tyler." He's commanding her to do so. He can't touch her but he can stare straight into her eye. The Doctor sounds confident and victorious but his precious girl can see the start of his crumbling too. Only with him, he had many more lives to go before supernova.
He would for sure be a supernova. The Doctor becoming a black hole was unthinkable.
"Forever." she's promising him again and this time, the Doctor smiles.
First DW fic, so of course it had to be a Rose/Doctor one. I know the whole plot of the piece is as nebulous as Rose Tyler herself but for the first time in a long time, I'm happy with what I wrote.
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