Author's Notes: Written for Who Contest drabble challenge #8: Cold. I pretty much embraced the melodrama. Please bear with me.
She finds it strangely difficult to pretend that awakening in the morning doesn't feel more like dying than living.
The word 'depression' is bounced around her as though she's deaf or not even present. She refuses to let it define her, whatever her family and friends think. She's not depressed; she's grieving. She's lost the fantastic life she crafted for herself and the man she loves all in a matter of seconds, and they've been replaced with an existence that can't begin to compare. Is it any wonder that her sense of purpose has gone a little astray?
Her Mum says she's been acting like a completely different person since then (Jackie never gives name or description to it for fear that it might cause Rose's last tenuous threads to snap). Rose knows it's true. She's colder... numb. In a way, Rose Tyler was left behind in that other universe. She only ever feels remotely like that girl again when she's dreaming of his infectious smile.
Falling asleep feels like waking up when it's accompanied by his voice.
"Rose."
The repeating word is washed in a familiar satisfying tingle that she associates with everything waiting for her in that other universe, if only she could reach it. It makes the all-too-obvious lack of that echoing voice during her waking hours seem like a fresh shock to her system every single day.
"Rose."
She shivers and wonders when that moment of realisation that his insistent summons is just a dream will stop feeling like the stripping away of something integral.
"Rose."
The cold nothingness of the separating Void seeps insidiously further inside her. She wishes she could escape permanently into the warmth of dreams instead.
"Rose."
She thinks for a moment that she's merely imagining it when the word finally follows her into wakefulness. But it repeats one last time as she sits abruptly up in bed (that bed that will never be truly hers the way the one on the TARDIS still is). She feels the reverberation of the sound so intensely; it's more real than anything she's felt in three long months. She won't accept that she's just imagining it. This must be real. She needs it to be.
As the Doctor's call crosses from fleeting dreams into reality, the warmth is brought along with it, like a gift.
For the first time in months, Rose feels alive again.