Title: Tears for the Lonely
Characters: Rose, Jack, Jackie, mentions of Ten
Rating: G
Spoilers: The Stolen Earth, Turn Left
Summary: Rose was able to find a way back to this Earth, but the Daleks beat her there. A bit grim. AU.
Notes - This is just me posting a few things from my LJ account, more to follow!
Rose walks among them, the wounded and the dying, tread quiet as she goes, unmindful of the matter under her feet. Children grow quiet as she passes for reasons they know not, and old veterans shiver and look away for reasons they know full well – she is like them, this girl. She has seen war, and now her eyes look through the living to the distant horizon. It is the dead she sees.
She cries as the death toll rises around her, and she feels little pieces of her soul giving way as she does. She hears the names of the people lost and learns them as best as she can, it is the least she can do. She doesn't want anyone to be forgotten. A school trip to Ypres haunts her now, and she doesn't want a repeat of that – rows and rows of graves without names, bodies without identities, corpses without stories. It upsets the people who love her, she knows this. Especially her mother:
'Rose love, why are you crying? You never even knew them.'
'And now I never will know them, isn't that something to cry about?'
Her mother doesn't understand, though she tries – but Jack does. It comforts and worries her, to know that he knows she cries to try and keep herself human, to try and retain some shred of how she had been when she met him. Her spirit is her mask as much as her base nature and Jack knows how to see clearly through it. But Jack is a soldier above all things, he doesn't cry easily and that's ok. She'll just have to try and stay human for both of them.
They are the walking wounded.
She cries when she hears the lasers in the distance, or in her dreams, or sees their shadows in the eyes of the survivors. She cries when she hears a child call out for a loving voice that will not reply. She cries when she feels another fragile life slip through her fingers as she tries desperately to staunch blood, soothe burns.
She doesn't cry when she carries a gun, though she knows he would be disappointed. Nowadays, it is a comfort to think that he is alive to have an opinion of her at all.
She is flat when she doesn't cry, not so much washed out as empty. It frightened people, she knew:
'It's not that she isn't cute, but when you look at her it's like you're seeing a damn ghost'.
They survived, her and Jack, but it's costing them their humanity. Rose cries for them both to feel human and Jack protects them both to feel alive. Maybe that is how they survived, but the understanding runs deeper than that. She knows that he hears singing in his dreams too, and that is how they survived. A tiny ray of hope, even with the darkness approaching and a wolf's howl ringing in her ears.
She prays he won't see her if that little light goes out.