There's a Time to Die
If he was willing to die for her, why wasn't he willing to live for her? Death seems easier, surrendering his tired, weary body to peaceful, freeing oblivion. How many times in his long, arduous lives had he wished for death? The howling, pitiful screams, scared, scarred and animalian, echoing in the deafening silence of his mind when the cacophony of millions of muddled voices and expression ceased, the blood on his hands that the blessed flowing rivers of Jordan would never wash clean, the soul patched up with duct tape and band aids until it was mostly obliterated and barely recognisable, oh the pain, the emptiness the eternity of cursed longevity.
How many innocent, vibrant hearts had untimely stopped their staccato beat so that his, worn, wounded double percussion, would linger and harmonise with the bleeding carcass of the universe? He'd let this rut of unending existence solidify and metastasize into a labyrinthine root system of what habitually became normality. He insulted their brave sacrifices in the convoluted perception of reality that he himself had nurtured with martyred hands.
Why should his life matter more and yet the universe seemed to deem it so? Was his punishment to die to life and join the reams of the fallen, grateful dead until that last breath, that slowing pulse and cradled head in his lap, was more understood and even envied by him than life itself?
Death had become an old friend. Death he knew how to do. Life evaded him. He recalled words that had caressed his lips many times before and no doubt would again that, 'life is easy. There's almost something to live for'. But for so long he'd be living for death - death's hand maiden and harbinger. Living for life meant that death would become a thing to be feared and his life was punctuated by death. Surely he couldn't handle the hypocrisy of a life lived in perpetual fear for to let in the living, he would have to welcome the dead.
How long could he survive watching life, extolling and protecting it until its meaning and his very reason d'etre became a foreign concept to him? He'd waited hundreds of years, found excuses, judged and sentenced himself as 'unworthy' but now it wasn't only him that he was condemning. It was Rose.
Rose who had made it very clear that she'd chosen him over her life. Rose who had told him that he was the special someone that she wanted to waste her short, human existence knowing and sharing herself with. Rose that told him forever and meant it.
She lived life so fully, so luxuriantly, awe struck and humbled by its beauty and she was right - a woman like her can't just go back to being ordinary with no stupid paper qualifications or friends left to love and remember her, at least not without extinguishing everything that makes her amazing. She was an 'all or nothing' type of light that burnt so brightly and she, with such maturity and selfless bravery, had chosen the 'all' even if it meant enduring the 'nothing' or the 'all' being ripped from her feminine, gentle grasp too soon.
He'd always thought of his companions as temporary and vowed to enjoy their waning enthusiasm while he had the time and the chance but Rose had turned his carefully constructed world on it's head, proving that she was in this 'thing' 'til death. Satellite 5, Downing Street, that wretched impossible planet – no way out, no choice, (Madden's Studio) and she had smiled and taken his hand without regret, no bemoaning the husband she never married or the children she never raised to be little, Jackie Tyler, slapping hellions. She wouldn't become obsessed by her own mortality like so many others and decide that T.A.R.D.I.S. living was just too dangerous and potentially fatal. She believed in this life in a way he thought that no one other than himself could fathom but she did it out of love and compassion and not absolution.
He expected or at least desperately hoped that his companions trusted him, but now he had to trust her promised word and that she wouldn't renege on her promise as soon as he let himself believe it and all the potential that came with it.
If Rose Tyler was going to live her brief, brilliant life with him, if he was the best she was going to get, then he better bloody step up and deserve her. He wanted her life to be fantastic, wanted her happiness, to give her everything that she had throw away but giving her that life meant that he, the last of the Time Lords, the Oncoming Storm and Destroyer of Worlds would too have to live, because that would make his foolish, impetuous human, happy. And so he would be rewarded by another startling human sacrifice. Rose Tyler deserved to be loved and he was the only one around to love her. Finally he was given a noble and wonderful excuse to live and love.
No second chances, he was that sort of a man, but for Rose he'd give myself the benefit of the doubt and a second chance to reconnect to what he'd lost and the universe he'd vowed to defend.