'Rose Tyler…' The Doctor's image faded away, leaving me standing alone on the beach, still staring at the place he had just disappeared from. My hand flew up to cover my mouth as I felt a terrible anguished sob tearing at my throat. It felt like my heart had just ripped in two, then turned into some kind of dense metal and plunged to the bottom of my stomach. There was the painful sour prickle in my nose and the tears came pouring down relentlessly as I heard the sounds of hurried footsteps on the sand behind me, and then a pair of warm arms pulled me into a hug.
Mum didn't say anything at first as I sobbed into her coat. I didn't blame her, though; what could you possibly say to your twenty-year-old daughter when the man she loves is in another universe with no way of reaching her? Not a lot.
'Oh, Rose,' Mum said, stroking my hair comfortingly as I continued to soak her shoulder with my tears. 'Oh, my Rose…'
After a while I stopped sobbing, but the tears still refused to cease. The salt stung my eyes and my hair was sticking to the rivers down my cheeks. I felt dizzy – crying your heart out can do that to you. I pulled away from my mother's arms and sank slowly onto my knees. I felt the rough sand under my fingertips; the sand didn't belong to my world. Nothing here belonged to my world, except myself, my mum and Mickey. I blinked away the tears that had been blurring my vision, and looked past my mother to where Mickey and my dad were standing by the Jeep. My father, Pete Tyler, died twenty years ago; he was run over by a car at a friend's wedding. And yet here he was, standing on a beach in Norway – well, parallel Norway. And he wasn't my dad, really; he was the parallel Pete. And yet he still felt like he was. My dad, I mean. He treated me like a daughter – practising, maybe, for when the baby came.
'There's five of us now,' I'd said. 'Mum, Dad, Mickey and the baby.' The Doctor – my Doctor – had given me a look, which I couldn't quite understand; it almost looked sad.
'You're not…' he'd said.
'No,' I shook my head and laughed, catching on to where this was going. 'it's Mum. It's been three months now. More Tylers on the way…'
But… what had he been thinking, exactly? That me and Mickey…? I frowned at the sand that filtered slowly through my fingers. No. He would have known that that relationship had been no more than platonic for a long time, from my side at any rate.
So then he thought…? Well. I didn't even know if that actually worked. I mean, he was an alien…
I shook my head to try to clear it, and get my thoughts back to the present; not the past, not what could have been. I had to forget that now.
I pushed myself up off the ground, brushing off the sand on my hands on the front of my jeans. Mum watched me, her brow knitted together in concern for me, like she thought I was going to have a major break down at any moment. She reached forward and brushed away the couple of stray blonde hairs that were sticking to my tear-stained cheeks.
'Time to go home?' she asked, just like how she did when she'd taken me to the park when I was a little kid. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me gently on the forehead.
'Yeah,' I sighed, swallowing, 'let's go.'
No one said anything as we climbed back into the Jeep, although I caught a couple of concerned glances passed between the other three. The whole journey back to the house was filled with that silence – the one where nobody can think of anything to say, but nobody really feels like much talking anyway. So I was left alone to think, which would have been okay in any other situation, but at the moment my mind had been completely taken over with thoughts about how I was stranded on parallel Earth in a parallel universe to the one I had known, and the one the Doctor was stuck in with no means of getting to me without risking the collapse of both universes. And that I loved him, and didn't get to hear him say the same. I wiped away another tear on the sleeve of my coat.
