Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who.
hearts like supernovas
It happens not long after the sun burns up. Not Earth's sun—the sun, the one he martyred for Rose. For himself. For them both.
Later—maybe days, maybe minutes, maybe even a lunar year—the TARDIS crashes. The Doctor is lonely, and he is tired, and saving the world again seems impossible. He thinks of blonde hair and smiles and the burning of time in her eyes as his box falls and falls and shakes, hitting the ground and throwing him into the air and back against the doors. He knows he's still got the gravity of the Milky Way holding onto him, but he doesn't know if he's on Venus or Neptune or poor discarded Pluto. He doesn't know if it's CE 13 or CE 23,440; if he'll fall out into an atmosphere of methane vapour or one of liquid helium.
He hopes the atmosphere isn't heavy with oxygen. He can't be on Earth. He loves humans; they inspire him, they must. Most of them can't see more than five minutes in the future—some only five seconds—but they keep trying. They don't know the big picture, they don't even know a square millimetre of the big picture, but they try to make their sand-sized world better. Most of them. Most of them inspire him.
But seeing them now, when his hearts hurt, will make him see Rose. And he may start wondering how many suns there are in all of these intertwined galaxies, whether it's possible that there are more rips in the fabric of the universes, ones that he doesn't know about. He might start wondering if it's worth it to leave a wake of supernovas, a pattern of black holes throughout space, just to keep seeing her. And that thought is dangerous. It is forbidden and it is selfish and it is everything he's spent nearly ten centuries fighting against. And so he can't. He can't see humans because he can't see Rose because he could see Rose; if he burnt up the whole world, he might be able to have her again. And the Doctor's tragedy is that he always could, but he never will.
Time tempts him; he thought he had grown enough to resist it. But she had opened him up again and she had sacrificed everything for the world and he would love to sacrifice everything for her. And so he hopes, when he opens the door, that this is the planet of the Ood. Or a planet he's never been on before, or one he's never seen with her.
He is not prepared when he opens the door of the TARDIS and city-scented air rushes in. It smells like oxygen and nitrogen and smokestacks. It smells like sweat and alcohol and rubbish. In the hazy glow from the street lamps overhead he can see that the TARDIS has crashed him into the back alley of a club. The sign on the stone wall of the building isn't familiar, but the word is English and he thinks he's in London. Of course he's in London, because Time tortures him.
He's not sure of the date, but he thinks it's sometime after 2000, sometime before 2010. A dangerous decade. He could get back in the TARDIS and spin off again. It would be easy to find somewhere else, some time else. But his ship has landed him here, and the TARDIS always has some purpose. She has more purpose than he does, most of the time.
So he locks the doors and slips his key into his pocket, scuffs his Converse against the soggy cardboard beer boxes that carpet the concrete, and crosses the alley in seven small steps. He buzzes the sonic screwdriver against the locked door. It swings open and sends him inside, and he is immediately hit with about seventy different scents of cologne and perfume and drenched in the heavy bass of inexplicable pop music.
He's come in the back entrance, behind the bar, and here he is protected from the crush of people writhing just three metres away, their bodies nearly indiscernible in the dim blur of coloured lights.
"Oi, mate!" A burly man steps around the row of beers on tap and leans down, his furry face too close to the Doctor's.
It is jarring. The last voice he had heard was his, his saying, "Rose Tyler," his not telling her he loved her, his shaky cowardice. And now an oversized bartender has his bloodshot eyes pressed into the Doctor's space, his rough voice shouting to be heard over the thump of the music.
The Doctor's hand fumbles in his pocket after one frozen moment; he pulls out the psychic paper and shows it to the bartender. It says something about him being a rep from Guinness. It doesn't really matter, the bartender shrugs and pushes him by the shoulder out beyond the bar, depositing him in the crowd.
And suddenly he can't breathe. It feels like he's about to regenerate, but he can't be, he hasn't died again, not physically. The humans around him don't notice, they adjust to include him in their movements, a girl grinds against him and he cannot be here, cannot be here among the hardest people in the world—cannot because she was always soft.
He makes his way to the edge of the wall and curses the TARDIS and curses himself and the fucking rip in the universes and the fact that he will never see her again.
Never, except there's someone in the crowd with blonde hair and it could be hers. He keeps his eyes on her, this mysterious girl, this one who's sort of short and curvy and very blonde. She's got her face turned away from him, facing a boy he hadn't noticed at first, but it might be Mickey. He can't really see anything, not in this light, but he knows her hair is blonde and this girl is the right height and what if it is Rose?
What if it is Rose? That question cuts; it stops him, stops all his thoughts on all their different tracks. It doesn't matter if it is her. It just means that it isn't yet 2005, it just means that her present and her future have no effect on her past.
But he cannot look away. And then she turns her head, laughing at something the boy who may be Mickey has said, and there is no mistaking that face; even in this light, even in this crowd, the Doctor knows Rose.
He pushes away from the wall in one moment and is in the crowd in another; the spaces between the seconds take him to her side. Just as her name settles on his tongue he catches himself. Only because Mickey's eyes have fallen on him and this is a different Mickey than the one he knew. This man is in love with Rose and if the Doctor steps between them at this moment, he may break a love story that hasn't ended yet.
He steps back, and Mickey nods slowly over Rose's shoulder. Rose hasn't noticed; she won't notice. She won't see him, like this, for another two years.
The Doctor leaves the club by the front entrance. He finds the back alley and unlocks the TARDIS and sends it off to orbit Earth's moon for a little while. He sits on the floor and taps the screwdriver against the sole of his right shoe and he stares around him. Rose had said, "It's bigger on the inside." Everyone always said that.
He never told any of them that it was too big. But right now, the inside of the TARDIS feels vast. It feels empty.
He sees Rose, still. The younger one, the one who might love Mickey, the one who works in a shop and sees herself growing old and having children and living the same life all her friends live. But she wouldn't have been happy with that future. She was happy then. She was happy in that club, pressed against Mickey, laughing.
The thought of her happy keeps him sane. If she hadn't been, he would be back there, he would be there for the nineteen years before he knew her. The Doctor would warp her past and shatter the future, if she had seemed unhappy. But she was laughing. And she hadn't noticed him, in the club. She had had nineteen years of normalcy before he introduced her to the world.
He remembers Rose. He remembers her when he first saw her, in the shop, when he wasn't himself and she wasn't yet his. He remembers her bravery, her sacrifice—the way she glowed with Time, sent out tendrils of life, brought Jack back, burnt him up, made him himself. He remembers her in another world, on the shore in the wind, crying, telling him she loves him.
He remembers all the time in between the first meeting and that last one; Rose and the Doctor—the whole universe at their fingertips. The problem was: one universe never could have been enough to hold them.
A/N: I cannot stop. Ten's angst is like an excuse for the most self-indulgent corner of my mind to go crazy. I'm sorry.
Please leave a review if you liked, hated, want me to try to write something happy, or, you know, for any other reason. Even if you just want to ask what I put on my chips/fries.
Cheers!