It's dying, Rose knows. She knows this from the moment she turns the key in the lock. She knows before she takes a hesitant step inside, as soon as she runs her shaking hand along the oddly cold coral, and when the hum that should be greeting her instead meets her ears as a shallow, choked whisper. It's a hello and a goodbye all in one. She'd hoped that coming here would be an answer, that the TARDIS could help her solve this awful mystery of the disappearing stars. Instead, it's simply one more thing she loves that she can feel slipping away from her. It's her friend, her home, and she can feel its life ebbing away, its golden tendrils of time grown sallow and brittle. She can't stop it - somehow she knows this at the core of her being. She swallows it down, a bitter consolation, and solemnly allows the uniformed troops to enter the ship behind her.
UNIT doesn't care. She can hear them rattling about in the console room behind her, dozens of pairs of boots stomping unceremoniously on the grating. The temporal physicists prattle on in awe about cosmic transducers and regression sequences, the archivists snap photos of technology they can't hope to understand, and everyone, everyone, is amazed that it is bigger on the inside.
They're here to help - she knows they're here to help, she asked them to, after all - and yet in the moment, it feels like she's leading a tourist group traipsing through her best friend's funeral. Which is highly accurate and inaccurate at the same time - UNIT had barely let her see the body, barely let her say goodbye before it was incinerated on the order of a UNIT scientific advisor named Kate, who at the same time that she denied Rose entrance to say goodbye one final time, told her she was so, so sorry. Oh, the irony.
She's not quite sure what universe this is - not yet. It's the first one she's come through that has a Doctor in it - had a Doctor in it - and Rose has the sonic screwdriver to prove it. She's clutching it inside her coat like a weapon, like a lifeline, like the only thing that's worth having in this godforsaken multiverse. UNIT doesn't know she has it, of course not, or they'd be so, so sorry to take it away from her as well.
She asked them to come here, but she can't wait to get away from them.
Something spurs her to walk on, putting her left foot in front of her right in front of her left, towards the corridor, slipping past the UNIT crew all around her. As if they'd notice that she were gone with all the new technology for them to explore. God, they sound almost gleeful. They're like little kids on Christmas morning, opening their presents in a tomb. She feels a little niggling in the back of her head ... do it ... do it. She doesn't know if it's the TARDIS, which seems so weak, or her own curiosity to see if this was her Doctor, her TARDIS, her ... everything.
She turns her back and walks on, unnoticed, out of the console room and down the hall, disappearing like a ghost.
-DWDWDWDWDW-
She can't find her room. She tries and begs and pleads, but all to no avail. She walks in circles for an hour but it's nowhere to be found. She's not even sure why she wants to see it - it's not as if she wants anything she left here, but she wants to know that it still is here all the same. It's as if the very fact that she can't find it is more than reason enough for her to keep looking. The thought occurs to her that he may have chucked it, sealed off the room from the rest of the ship and dumped it into the vortex. Keeping it could have been too painful for him, and that very thought is too painful for her. She'd never come across any previous companion's rooms during her time here, after all. Spurred on, needing to prove to herself that it's still here, she races through halls to no avail.
Well, not to no avail. Several times, she finds his room, which she'd been in often enough. In fact, the more often she turns a corner looking for her room, the more often she finds his. The first time ... it's a beautiful novelty, and opening the door steals the breath from her lungs. It smells like him, and she half expects to see him pop his head up and say 'hello'. (Or more, than 'hello'. Or, less than 'hello', if there's a chance for a snog or a shag - and she is so, so not going to think about that until she manages to fix this mess and get him back). There's a white oxford discarded alongside a brown tie on an armchair near his bed, and at first she touches them gently, almost gingerly. It's him, or at least a part of him, it's among all that's left. She'd almost forgotten how small his shirts were, how thin he was, and the very fact that she's forgotten these things breaks her heart almost as much as being back here in the first place. Within milliseconds she grabs them and buries her face in the bundle, trying and failing to not cry. It's the first time she's let herself take a moment to properly mourn in what feels like years at this point and it almost feels good. She sinks down onto his bed, hardly registering shoving the tie into her pocket, timelines be damned, as she clutches to the shirt and sobs.
Something uncomfortable pokes at her thigh, distracting her from her grief and she looks over to see some sort of a long metal tube protruding into her upper thigh. Suddenly, she finally takes note of his bed, which is a haphazard mess, full of metal bits and bobs of unrecognizeable ... wait.
Not unrecognizeable. Very, very not unrecognizeable.
The memory floods her senses, rattling through her mind like a bumpy ride through the vortex, and hurling itself on the floor at her feet. How could she forget this? It was the day she'd left, she'd come in and flopped down on the bed next to him, comfortably close, but arguably platonically so. He was building ... something. He'd told her what it was. He'd told her and here it was, right in front of her, and she couldn't remember what he'd said to her. A temporal distorter - or a space distorter? A distorter, definitely - she remembers how he held it up to his eye like a telescope to make her laugh, and how all she could concentrate on was his mouth and his moistened lips and the way he was smiling at her, just inches away from her, and on his bed. The details she thought she'd never forget have gotten lost in the tragedy of the day, and in the hard work and pain and blood of the intervening years. She picks up the contraption gently, and sets it down carefully on the table beside her, not noticing the slight vibration it's been giving off since the moment it came into contact with her thigh.
Turning back towards the bed, she looks down at the pillow and sees a single, long blonde hair.
It looks too long to be hers - is it hers? How long was her hair then? Was it truly this shade of blonde? Or is this some backwards, cruel universe and does it belong to someone else? Who else? And where, where the fuck, is her room?
Something flips in her stomach and clutches at her heart, squeezing it painfully and Rose suddenly feels like she can't breathe. She's forgotten so many little things – has he forgotten her too? Was she so easily replaceable?
Or perhaps he never met her here, in this strange universe. Perhaps he met someone else entirely. She discards the thought almost immediately – she'd been tracking timelines, after all. She existed here. Canary Wharf happened here. He'd lost her here. She knows this deeply and viscerally, it's a thought that's as clear and as simple to her as her own name.
She's not sure if that makes things seem better, or worse.
She brushes the pillow off, under the pretext of neatening it, and opens the door to leave the room, still clutching the shirt.
-DWDWDWDWDW-
This isn't the corridor.
The thought is a stupid one, an obvious one, because of course this isn't a bloody corridor. It's another bedroom, another bloody bedroom that isn't bloody hers ... but wait, is that a cradle? She looks around and sees what appears to be a changing table and rocking chair. Is this a nursery?
Her breathe somehow both quickens and catches in her throat at the same time as she looks around, awed. She slowly enters the room, Alice stepping through the looking glass. She hears a faint hum, and although she knows - she knows - it is not coming from the TARDIS, she chocks it up to the TARDIS anyway.
She approaches the cradle slowly, quietly, with more caution and uncertainty than she's been approaching Weevils and Sontarans alike in the intervening years.
Had this room been here before? She's certainly never seen it. Which of course could mean nothing, the TARDIS has an infinite number of rooms (except for hers, apparently) ... but a nursery?
A memory flickers to her mind, him saying he was a dad ... once. She's not sure if it's grief or frustration or jealousy bubbling up, and she can't help but think of that long blonde hair and the fact that she has never seen this room before and all of a sudden her stomach is churning. Is this even her Doctor? Or is he someone else's? Or perhaps he was hers and is now in the arms of someone new?
She reaches the small wooden cradle finally, coming to a stop as quietly as possible. It's empty, of course, but she mindlessly reaches a hand down to gently rock it anyway. Something pulls her towards it, like she knows she should love it – has loved it, will love it, loves it even now though she might not know it yet. As soon as her fingers touch it she feels a tiny, faint jolt, barely noticeable, and hears the unmistakeable sound of a baby cooing.
-DWDWDWDWDW-
The door flings open behind her, which is impossible because she knows that she left it open, and she sees a man enter the room. It's not a man she's ever met before, nor one that seems to even notice her. Indeed, he walks right through her, as if she is just an image. She's too shocked to register much about him as it happens so quickly, almost inhumanly so – sandy hair, opulent dressing gown. There's something timeless about him, as if the tendrils of time itself would untangle to let him slip through. She would love to say that she would recognize him if he were the Doctor, that she'd be able to sense him anywhere (and wasn't that indeed what she had been telling Torchwood all along?) – but she truly has no idea. She stays rooted to the spot as he reaches down and gently picks up an infant from the cradle, and makes his way to the rocking chair. He radiates care and nurturing and love, and she knows somehow that he is the child's father. He's singing something, something that Rose can't quite understand. It sounds almost like the audio on an old movie, slightly distorted and grainy and she can't even tell if it's English. Not that the TARDIS seems to be in any shape to translate, but the TARDIS hardly seemed to be in any shape to create this … this … whatever it was, either.
She starts to take a step forward towards the rocking chair, and hesitates. She suddenly feels out of place, like she is intruding. Her leather jacket and boots feel too hard for this room, too heavy. Paradoxically, at the same time, she feels too light – this man walked right through her after all. It strikes that she doesn't belong here – this was not meant for her eyes. The thought is like a slap to the face, her suddenly reddened cheeks the evidence of how hard it has hit her. She watches the man gently rock the child and place a gentle kiss to the top of his (her?) head.
Rose quickly backs away, leaving the nursery and stepping back into the Doctor's room.