"Think what you look like to them, all...pink and yellow." The Doctor. New Earth.
She was merely a dalliance. She knew that. Just a brief moment in that vast life of his. He seemed to forget that she had looked within him. She had walked through the doors of his mind, and in those few moments in which she caught him unawares, the whole of his life was laid out for her. Moving pictures before her very eyes.
She saw how tiny she really was. How his world stretched for so far and so long, that weary path he'd walked for eternity in solitude. She'd fancied herself someone important. Not only to her King, but also to her Fireplace Man, her protector, her lonely angel, her Doctor.
But he wasn't her Doctor. He belonged to another. The lies he told to himself, the lies he told to her without meaning to, she looked beyond them. Saw those moving pictures within his mind, his memories, his emotions, every thought he had ever had and some he had yet to experience.
She saw gold. Pink and gold. She saw unimaginable creatures, monsters far worse than those that stalked her nightmares. She saw impossible contraptions, stars that even the greatest astronomers of the court would not have been able to identify. She saw the history she had been told in stories as a young child.
Throughout them all, there was the pink and gold. Sometimes just a feeling, sometimes a thought, sometimes a flash, more a spectre existing everywhere and nowhere within his memories.
Most of the time though, the pink and gold assembled into a shape. The shape of the child the Doctor had brought with him through the mirror. Rose. The name fit the oddly attired woman. So beautiful, looking so delicate, but with her own defences, the thorns of the rosebushes in the palace gardens would tear to shreds any intruder who dared to encroach upon their territory, and the woman, too, wouldn't hesitate.
He felt a strange mixture of pride and fear when she appeared in the stories his mind wove. Knowing it was he who placed her in terrible danger time and time again, knowing she would survive, but always, there was that fear that she wouldn't. That terrible, aching, paralysing terror that he would be the cause of her death. The loneliness he envisioned stretched before him, the darkness that was the only possible outcome of her death.
She, who had walked the rooms of his memories and his hidden thoughts, she knew the truth. Knew what he lacked the courage to admit to himself. She felt it, it was impossible not to. Every memory, every thought, every picture in his mind, the pink and gold was present. The stifling fear was present. And encompassing it all, there was the overwhelming love.
Even knowing, as she did, that the love he felt belonged to another, it was impossible not to feel it and hope, even just for a short while that such love could be shared. When one felt the purity of love that one person held, it was impossible not to offer your own love in return.
So when the child looked at her in that way, when the Doctor stood by the window and saw, not the stars but the absence of pink and gold, she knew.
Even when he came back to the fireplace, in a cruel imitation of the imaginary man who had saved her all those years ago, saved her in so many ways, she knew that the story would never have the denouement she wished.
She had presented her lonely angel with her heart, knowing that he treasured above all else that of the rose who called him Doctor.
