All her stuff was still there. She didn't have much, but it was mostly there. He'd locked up the room, her room. That was simple enough. He didn't go below deck most of the time anyway, so that was fine.
It was fine.
Well, no, not fine. But it had to be, didn't it? If someone asked him if he was alright, the first answer was "fine". That was how it worked.
Even if there was no one to ask.
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He wished he had the guts to go back himself and rescue Rose, just before he'd lost her. But he couldn't. He really couldn't. That sort of thing wasn't allowed.
Why?
That was a good question. But there were all sorts of reasons why. If he went around changing time whenever he wanted, the world would be...
Perfect?
No, no, not perfect, not necessarily. Perfect for one person, not for everyone. One-sided perfection is just as bad as no perfection.
What, so Rose wouldn't be perfect?
No...Yes...He banged the TARDIS controls frustratedly and shook his head.
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When the Doctor finally thought he'd taken everything related to Rose and put it somewhere out of his reach, he'd find something else.
This time it was a picture he'd taken of her on...He'd forgotten now. All memories of him and Rose seemed to have merged into one long memory that made him yearn for things that he couldn't have.
He remembered this particular trip, though. They'd had a fight with some sort of alien candyfloss that stuck to anything and everything. In the picture, Rose was looking right into the camera. She had what looked like lime-green candyfloss in her hair. She was smiling...
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He couldn't look at their photographs. He had once, and found himself looking at hundreds of different Roses, all smiling. It was like torturing himself. He regarded photographs as pieces of the past. They all made him smile, but intensified the ache inside him. Some of the pictures were ones he didn't even remember. One was a portrait they'd had painted some time in the seventeenth century. Another was an electronically mastered elecograph from the forty-fifth century. It didn't matter to him. They were all Rose, the one thing he knew he couldn't have.