This sprang from a reference in To Be The Wolf, in response to prompt #19 - Gray for the 100 Themes Challenge. Part of the Survival series.

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This Stunning Monochrome

The sky is grey, the sand is grey, and the ocean is grey.
I feel right at home in this stunning monochrome, alone in my way.
I smoke and I drink and every time I blink I have a tiny dream.
But as bad as I am I'm proud of the fact that I'm worse than I seem.
What kind of paradise am I looking for?
I've got everything I want and still I want more.
Maybe some tiny, shiny thing will wash up on the shore.
-Ani DiFranco, "Grey"

~.o0o.~

Rose Tyler left the dingy motel room at daybreak, setting out on her half hour trek down to the beach. It was a pilgrimage she had engaged in every morning these past two weeks—rising with the sun, wandering the shoreline until sunset, and then attempting to drown her sorrows in scotch and whiskey at whichever pub her feet had led her closest to during the daylight hours. The alcohol didn't affect her much anymore, but she felt it couldn't hurt to try, and memories somehow came easier with a burning sensation in her throat than they did without.

In all the time she had been in this universe, the two weeks she had spent here are the only thing for which she knows the Doctor would not be proud of her. She couldn't find it within herself, though, to feel shame for this.

It had been twenty-two years, now, since they said good-bye and Darlig Ulv Stranden hadn't changed much. Neither had she. Her hair was still dyed blond, almost as long now as it was when she first started traveling with him. Her skin and face were permanently youthful; only her eyes gave away her age, and she kept them guarded.

She had acquired a uniform, of sorts—a burning pink wrap top with long sleeves and bare midriff from a boutique in Paris, a heavy navy tweed jacket with brown leather elbow patches from a thrift shop in some little town in Germany, a roughly knit purple scarf bought from the trunk of a hippie's car in Amsterdam, and black bootcut jeans that she vaguely remembered packing before she had left London for the last time. Her clothing was composited from the places she had traveled through now that she was technically dead. She didn't carry luggage anymore, washing her clothes in hotel bathtubs by hand and finding a peculiar freedom in the fact that everything she truly needed and cherished in life could be contained in her pockets.

Rose nodded absently in greeting to the fishermen she passed, on their way to docks on the river inland. She heard several whisper once her back was to them-she only half understood the mumbled Norwegian, although she was getting better at it. As time passed, she was finding it easier to absorb information, including languages, and the past two weeks had been an excellent crash course. It meant she understood enough to know that the locals were more than a little afraid of the strange Englishwoman who always wore the same thing.

She would have to move on soon to avoid gathering any more attention to herself. But not yet-she still hadn't found what she came here for. She doubted she would, of course. She was chasing a memory, of a voice she hadn't heard in more than two decades. It had first occurred to her in Prague, visiting a museum and remembering a certain statue of Fortuna, that she couldn't remember the Doctor's voice any more. The thought that she was losing her memories of him, one of the few things she had left of her time in the TARDIS, had panicked her in a way she hadn't felt since she first fell through the Void.

So Rose chased the memory, and now she was walking to the beach at Darlig Ulv Stranden, daybreak bleeding red through low clouds, and the world shrouded in mist. One of the sailors waved at her, and called out a greeting, unusual in that most of them only begrudgingly acknowedged her existence. He called out again, and she stopped.

"You shouldn't go down to the shore today, miss. There's a storm rolling in. Best to find shelter."

Rose smiled weakly at the man, and waved him off. "Thank you, but I'll be fine. I've nothing to fear from an oncoming storm."

The fisherman gave her a strange look, but shrugged and went back to his work, and Rose continued on her way to the water. When she reached it, the sun had risen high enough to be nothing but a pale disc of weak white light behind roiling grey cloud cover. The clouds were intense and heavy, seeming to rest on top of the roaring waves, and sky, sea, and sand all blended into a single tableau of dark, wet grey. She could hear thunder in the distance, and flashes of lightning arced through the ponderous cloud cover.

For the first time since arriving, Rose felt the memory she had been chasing tickle the edges of her brain, just out of reach. She turned her face to the sky, opening herself to the sound and fury gathering around her, and the uniform grey of the landscape shifted in her mind to another monochrome-brown eyes, brown hair, brown suit and trench. As her eyes misted, she called out the name she'd been desperate to rediscover.

"DOCTOR!"

As if hearing her cry, the heavens opened, and the deluge of the storm washed over her. In the torrent of rain and thunder, Rose Tyler finally heard the voice she had been searching for.

If it's the last chance I have to say it, Rose Tyler...