"When I hear the music of the stars, so beautiful, so sad, I think that it is like a mourning."
She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, listening as if she could actually hear it. Rose was sitting on the doorstep of the TARDIS, swaying her legs slowly, and within a few light minutes of the force field of the ship the white-blue star was lying, exhaling the solar wind.
"They have what to mourn for," the Doctor answered.
He was busy with the console for a while, fiddling with settings, and now he approached, leaning his palm against the doorway. Unseen air streams were swaying their hair, circulating within the atmospheric dome that allowed to drink coffee with the legs hanging in the boundless space of the Universe.
"You think so?" she asked, opening her eyes and fastening them on the white matter flows, rising from the star's surface.
"Consider how many worlds a star can survive," the Doctor looked into the depths of the space with unseeing eyes, "how many civilizations may arise and vanish while it is only leaving the nursery. How many deaths and monstrous disasters, flowing into each other, form a perpetual circle of birth and death — much faster than the stars' fading."
There was a pause as if he should say something else, but he didn't. Rose opened her mouth to ask a question, but suddenly the Doctor proceeded:
"So, they have what to mourn for. You can hear this song because I modulated the TARDIS so that you could hear it," he roused himself, smiling his usual playful smile. "Besides, it didn't even confuse you that you're looking at the star with the bare sight, moreover — that close."
Rose kicked him on the knee and smiled too, but her smile soon faded away, touched by the cold of comprehension.
"You do always hear them, don't you?"
She could not ask, the answer was too obvious.
"Yes."
There was silence again, in wich he ran his hand through the unruly hair, and she rose to her feet.
"And you, Doctor?"
For some seconds he was still looking into the distance before shifting his gaze and looking her in the eyes. This look, open and genuine, so attractve and compelling to smile, now was making him want to hide, to run, turn away to not see it.
"And I'm mourning for the stars."