Aged With Misery
Prologue
Rose Tyler had lived a lifetime without The Doctor, each day passing by at a slow pace in her mind. The life she had now was a life she'd always wanted, a life she could share with her family and the one true love of her life. There was just one problem that ate away at her through every day that had passed and that was that the man she had married wasn't the man she had wanted this life with. He might have looked like the man she'd fallen in love with all those years ago and he might sound like him. He knew everything about their lives together down to the last detail but, in spite of all of that, he still wasn't him. She had tried so hard to convince herself otherwise, oh how she had tried, but it wouldn't stick in her mind. Thelogical part of her brain always lead her back to the same conclusion; her husband wasn't The Doctor and he never would be. Rose knew it was wrong to settle for second best, having learned that lesson a long time ago when she had tried to force her relationship with Mickey despite her overwhelming emotional attachment to her Time Lord travelling companion but she didn't have any other choice anymore. She would never see her Doctor again, the walls of the universes standing between them, a constant obstacle in their love story.
While Rose missed The Doctor every day of her life with John Noble, the name her husband had adopted in honor of both the man he had been created from and the woman who made his life possible, she was also incredibly angry at the Gallifreyan man for sending her away again without giving her a chance to choose for herself. He'd made her feel like a fool, spending all that time trying to find a way back to him, even during the chaos that Davros and the Daleks were inflicting on the cosmos, only for her to wind up exactly where she started because the man she loved was too much of a martyr to admit that he felt for her too. She understood why he did it, not wanting to live a handful of years with her only to watch her wither away but, if he'd have given her the chance, she would have told him that she needed him in her life. Even if they could never be together the way she wanted, she would rather suffer with that dull pain in her chest while still having his hand to hold as they ran across the stars than have the feeling of her insides being turned inside out every day while holding the hand of someone who was only like him.
John may have everything The Doctor had but he also had a lot of Donna in him too and that was what stopped her from being able to see him as the impossible man that taken her hand that night at Henrik's department store and changed her life with a single syllable. His constant exclaimations about how things were 'wizard' or 'bonkers' gave her an uneasy feeling in her gut that only grew worse when he woke her one morning in a fit of excitement, exclaiming about how 'it had finally happened'. She hadn't had the faintest idea what he was talking about until he showed her the single strand of ginger hair that he had plucked from his head. She didn't hear the end of his boasting for weeks. It had hurt her when he mentioned the time he'd asked her about his hair colour post regeneration. She remembered that day so vividly and she remembered The Doctor. She could picture him in her mind downto the last detail and John's personality compared to that of The Doctor's was like a bright neon sign in front of her, screaming out at her that the man in front of her was a stranger in the Time Lord's skin. She spent so long trying to convince herself that she could love a copy, repeating the past and pulling John out of the darkness he had been born into, just like she had when she'd first met The Doctor all those years ago, trying desperately to heal the tear in his heart where all that anger had been that she hadn't noticed what was happening to her - or rather, what wasn't happening to her.
She had never noticed before because she had only been stranded in her parallel universe for a few short years before she had found a way back. However, after returning with John and trying desperately to learn to love him over the many years she'd spent there, it became more difficult to ignore. Rose hadn't aged in over fifteen years, a fact she had only discovered by chance. While it was a long time in a human's mind, exterior effects didn't show so quickly even after that long a period. The way her attire and style of her hair changed over that time had given her the appearance of aging, becoming slightly more conservative and work-friendly as she advanced up the career ladder at the Torchwood Institute she had been introduced to by Jake after the breach closed. The stain of stress and misery also added to her older-looking appearance, dark circles forming under her eyes after long hours working and her eyes themselves holding an essence of life beyond her years. When she looked in the mirror sometimes, she couldn't understand what she was looking at, even more so after the revelation of her frozen aging process that John had discovered during a routine diagnostic after a particularly exhausting field exercise. He'd noticed a strand of Artron energy looking around the helix in her DNA while running an in-depth blood test that had remained there after The Doctor had absorbed the Time Vortex from her on the Game Station. John had continued on to explain to her The Doctor's side of that experience and it had made Rose think more about how the man was living his life in their parallel world.
While Rose had wanted a more hands on approach at Torchwood, John had taken a more passive approach, chosing to bandage people up rather than shoot them down, not wanting to touch a gunand happily accepting the title of doctor, a name that Rose silently protested against. The subtle similarities between John and The Doctor only made their differences stand out that much more. Looking at him was like looking at a blurred photograph of someone from your past. You knew who the person in the picture was meant to be but your brain couldn't recognise them due to the imperfect nature of the still. That's what John was to Rose; an imperfect snapshot of someone she had lost. The irony in that view was that Rose didn't have any photographs of The Doctor. How she wished she still had her phone but she had lost that while attempting to close the breach at Canary Wharf. It must have been sucked into the Void with the Daleks and the Cybermen, having been covered in background radiation from travelling through time in Rose's pocket. She had nothing to truly remember him as he was before everything got so complicated and now she had to stare at the face of the man she loved whilst knowing that, underneath it all, no matter how hard she tried to believe otherwise, it wasn't her Doctor staring back at her.