A/N: Well, here it is. My new Doctor Who AU fic! Enjoy, review, all that good stuff. I'll try to have the next chapter up soon. Keep an eye out for another oneshot that I'm working on right now :)
Pairing: Rose/Ten
Rose Tyler is an artist. At nineteen years old, she is living with her parents, Pete and Jackie, and has a normal life. But in her dreams, in her imagination, she creates incredible things: new worlds, new creatures, new people. She draws these odd characters and places, recreating her fantasies through art. She dreams up a man who she calls her guardian angel, and keeps him alive in her sketches. Little does she know that all of these things she draws, the things she thought were just figments of her wild imagination, are very, very real, and very, very dangerous.
The Paper Angel
Chapter One
There had never been a time in her life that Rose Tyler had felt more satisfied than when she was drawing. Ever since she was a child, she would spend her free hours with a notebook and some sort of writing utensil in her tiny little hands. First, it was a variety of brightly colored crayons; as she grew, she moved on to pencils, colored or otherwise; soon, she was experimenting with paints and oils and all sorts of different mediums. Most of her birthday money over the years was spent on new sketchpads and pencils. Now, at age nineteen, Rose would come home from her job at a department shop and lock herself in her room to draw up whatever wild creations she had daydreamed while at work. She would often stay in her bedroom, which substituted as a studio, until the late hours of the evening, usually missing dinner with her mother and father. She would only emerge once or twice, maybe to grab an apple from the fruit bowl after Jackie made her wash her hands thoroughly. Rose wore her long, blonde hair in a ponytail, messily tied to the back of her head, and dressed herself in old t-shirts and ripped pairs of jeans. Her skin was always stained grey with charcoal or graphite, and her clothing was always covered in dark streaks where she would wipe her hands when she finished a sketch.
Rose's father always told her what an incredible imagination she had. Before bedtime, little Rose would help Pete tell her bedtime stories, which never failed to astound both her parents. They were full of creatures that Rose seemed to create out of nowhere, names of imaginary places and people appearing on the tip of her tongue. Every night was a new adventure for all three of them. "You have galaxies inside your head, love," Pete would tell her as he tucked her in and kissed her forehead. "Entire universes, just waiting to be thought up." Whenever she was asked where she got these wonderful and vivid ideas of her made-up worlds, Rose would only reply, "Oh, they're not made-up. They're all very, very real. I can feel them inside of me."
It wasn't long before the imagination spilled over into her art. For the past decade of her life, Rose's walls had been plastered with her sketches, somewhat of a real-time art gallery, showing how beautifully her drawing skills improved over the years. She never took any down, or threw any away, and her parents knew better than to touch the thousands of pieces of paper that had been pinned to the walls. The drawings continued to stack up until not a single trace of the flowered wallpaper of Rose's youth could be seen beneath them. Some of her more treasured drawings she hung from the ceiling with clear fishing wire, dangling down at different lengths and spinning gently whenever she moved about the room. The subjects of her drawings were ever-changing but always interesting. A young boy with a gas mask covering his face. Statues of angels, their hands covering their faces. Alien monsters with terrifying features, armies of robots, the face of a beautiful woman stretched flat like a canvas. People with the heads of cats, creatures with tentacles where their mouths should be, holding glowing orbs of light. Sometimes she drew people. There was a small, dark-skinned girl, who Rose fondly referred to as the soldier. Another she would draw from time to time was a fiery woman with lovely red hair. She rather liked both of these two. Other times, it was a younger man, very handsome and strong. He was the con man, the agent, the flirt. Some days it was a woman with a mass of curly hair, the time child. There were a few others who graced the pages on the walls, among them the ones Rose called the sparrow, the fireplace girl, the concrete woman and her caretaker, and someone named Harriet Jones. Very often the subject of her art was a tall contraption she called the blue box. Rectangular and rather small, Rose drew the box hurtling through a starry sky as often as she drew it sitting on solid ground.
There was one particular subject, however, that Rose found herself drawing more often than anything. A man. But he was much more than that. He was an angel. Rose's parents had found this odd, when one day their ten-year-old daughter had come running, bearing a piece of paper and saying "Look, Mum, look, Dad, I drew the angel!" Much to their surprise, the angel did not have wings, or a halo, nor was he dressed in white. He didn't even look remotely god-like. Rather, he was just a plain man, with a goofy smile and very large ears. But Rose had insisted that he was indeed an angel, and he appeared in her art frequently after that first time. Rose herself was taken with this man. She was always the most proud of her angel drawings, the way his forehead creased just so, and how his leather jacket always seemed to fit perfectly over his chest. Yes, he was her favorite.
After a while, Rose stopped drawing that man altogether, after one sketch where his usually blue eyes were filled with fire. She began to draw someone else; although she claimed it was the same man, the angel, just in a different form. She began to pay close attention to the details of the angel: some days she would draw his face, other days he was pictured from the waist down. The man was always dressed in the same brown pinstriped suit. Rose had drawn everything from a close-up of his collar, folded around the pale skin of his neck, to a white sneaker, laces peeking out from under a neatly hemmed trouser leg. She would focus on his eyes, deep and intense, which seemed to always be asking a question, one eyebrow furrowed as if in a state of incredible concentration. Sometimes it was his nose, slightly crooked and dotted with light freckles, or his shock of messy dark hair, or even the sharp, bold lines of his jaw, his lips pursed, neither frowning nor smiling. A few times it was his hands, with his long, slender fingers, holding a device that looked similar to a screwdriver, or stuffed deep into his pockets with an aura of nonchalance. Once, though she didn't know why, she drew him standing with his face and hands pressed against a wall, a single tear running down his cheek. This was her least favorite, though; she didn't like to see her angel sad. No matter what part of him she drew, the angel was always present in her art. She loved these drawings of the angel so much that she began to hang them from the ceiling. Rose almost felt as if the angel in her drawings was protecting her. From what, she wasn't sure, but he was certainly looking over her.
There were some drawings that she didn't hang anywhere in her room, though. She didn't want anyone to see, not even her parents. These were the ones where she drew herself with the angel. Whether she was standing with him outside the blue box, or whether he held her in a tight embrace, or whether the two of them stood facing each other on a beautiful beach, these were her private drawings. In her dreams at night, she would see him coming to take her away on adventures, falling through the stars to show her incredible things that only she had the imagination to believe. When she woke, she would grab the nearest piece of paper and writing utensil and draw what she had seen. One night right after her eighteenth birthday, she remembered very clearly. She awoke around 4 AM and drew the favorite sketch that she had ever done. The angel had his lips pressed against hers, his arms wrapped tightly around her waist. (Rose kept this drawing under her pillow, crumpled as it got from so many nights of her sleeping with it clutched in her hands.)
All her drawings of these beautiful worlds seemed to flow out of her like some sort of magic. There was not a single day she went without drawing, not a single night she went without dreaming of new places, new worlds to explore. She fell asleep every night, holding her favorite drawing tight to her chest, hoping that maybe someday, her angel would come for her.
"No, no, no!" Rose moaned as a draft from the open window blew what looked like hundreds of her drawings around the room in a paper tornado. She ducked to avoid one flying at her head, and dropping the charcoal stick she was holding, she stood up and began snatching papers out of the air. Realizing the inefficiency of this method while the breeze was still blowing, she ran over to the wall behind her bed and shoved the window down so it was halfway closed. As the rest of the papers settled down, drifting from the air onto the floor, she began to walk around, collecting them in her arms and pinning them back to her wall where they belonged. She maneuvered her way around the ones hanging from the ceiling, which were spinning madly in circles. Every so often as she passed she would catch a glimpse of a mouth smiling at her or a pair of eyes glancing in her direction as the papers turned. She smiled. Rose loved to feel her artwork looking down her, keeping watch over her. Sometimes the drawings just felt so real.
As soon as the sketches had all been returned to their usual places, Rose turned back to the drawing she had left unfinished on the floor. "Damn it!" she shouted, noticing that the charcoal she had dropped had landed perfectly on top of the paper, leaving a dark smudge right in the middle of the face she had been drawing. She dropped down on her hands and knees, trying to blend the spot into the rest of the drawing, but she soon discovered that it was a lost cause. Angry, she crumpled up the paper into a ball and threw it at the trash bin next to her desk. She groaned with frustration when the paper bounced off the rim and rolled a few feet away. Grabbing it, she placed it not so gently in the bin, and gave her desk a kick for good measure. She had really liked the drawing she was working on. She liked all of her drawings of the angel, of course, but this one in particular was better than usual. It was his whole face. It had been so good, with his cheekbones perfectly shaded, his eyes with incredible depth, the gentle flip of his hair just right. This time he had been wearing glasses. She really liked it when he wore his glasses… in her dreams, of course. That was really the only time she saw him.
Just as she had grabbed a new sheet from her sketchpad and sat down to start again, there was a knock at her door. "Yeah," she replied distractedly. The door creaked as it opened slowly to reveal Jackie Tyler peeking in.
"Rose, honey," Jackie spoke in a soft voice.
Rose didn't even look up from her paper, her right hand creating long, deft strokes with the pencil as she wiped her forehead with her other hand. She didn't notice the grey streak it left across her skin.
Jackie sighed, propping the door open a little more and leaning against the frame. "Rose, I think you need to get out of this room some more." Rose grunted in response, not processing her mother's words. "Lately it's all you've been doing, sitting in here alone, drawing your pictures." Again, Rose was quiet, still focused on the angle of the man's jaw that she was working on. "Rose, are you listening to me?"
"Yes, mum, I'm listening. I just want to finish this one, and then I promise I'll go out."
Jackie folded her arms across her chest. "Mickey's here. He wants to know if you would go out with him tonight." Rose sighed. Mickey was her boyfriend, if you could even call what they had a romantic relationship. Between both of their jobs and Rose's art, they only got to see each other a few times a week, usually on short dates when their lunch breaks matched up. She knew she should probably make a better attempt to see him more often, but honestly, she couldn't really be bothered. But as much as she really didn't want to go, she hated making her mother disappointed.
"Sure," she said, standing to put the unfinished drawing on her desk and replacing the stick of charcoal in its box. "I need to clean up, tell him I'll be out in a few minutes, yeah?" She instinctively reached up to tighten her ponytail.
"Yeah," Jackie smiled. She walked over and placed her hands on Rose's shoulders. "Trust me, Rosie. It'll be good for you."
Rose lifted the corner of her mouth in a half-smile. "I know, mum." Jackie wiped at the charcoal smudge on Rose's forehead before leaning in to kiss it gently.
"Now, go on, you've got a boy waiting!" She tapped Rose's backside lightly with her hand before turning and shutting the door behind her. Rose giggled as she walked into the bathroom and shed her dirty clothing. She climbed into the shower, closing her eyes and letting the hot water beat over her skin, scrubbing away the evidence of the work she had done that day.
When she was dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a hoodie, with her wet hair tied up in a ponytail, Rose emerged into the sitting room where Mickey and her parents were sitting. They were watching some reality show on the television and having tea. He jumped up as soon as he saw her, a smile spreading across his face.
"Hey, Mick," she greeted him. "Ready to go?"
"Sure, yeah," he said, grinning. "Thanks for the tea, Jackie. I'll have her back before midnight, Pete!" Rose barely had time to shout a quick goodbye before Mickey took her hand and pulled her towards the door.
"Finally, Rose! Ugh, it's been such a long time since we've had a nice, proper date. I mean, yeah, we had lunch on Tuesday for, like, thirty minutes, but it's Friday night and we haven't been to the pub in weeks. Does that sound okay, the pub? I mean, there's a game on tonight but we don't have to watch it, we could just go to the ice cream shop or to a film or something. I really don't care, I'm just glad we finally have time to go out, you know?" Rose wasn't listening as Mickey babbled on, just nodding every few seconds when she felt it was appropriate. Only when he asked a question that actually required her to answer did she fully engage herself in the conversation (mind you, it was after he asked three times).
Rose was so busy trying to keep up with Mickey's monologue that she almost didn't hear the quiet warble coming from the alley they had just passed. She stopped walking and held a finger up to quiet Mickey. "What?" he asked loudly, standing a few feet ahead of Rose. "What?" he repeated when she didn't answer.
"Did you hear that?" she asked. "That sound, did you hear it?" She was turned toward the alleyway, staring at it intently.
"What sound, Rose? I didn't hear any sound. Come on, let's just go." Mickey sounded exasperated. Rose didn't listen though, taking a few cautious steps toward the alley. "Rose! It was nothing. Really, we're almost at the pub. Come on."
Rose stood still for one more moment, before sighing and turning back to Mickey. "You're right," she said, still trying to convince herself that he really was. "It was nothing. Sorry, let's go." She took his hand, and he immediately started towards the pub, which was on the opposite side of the street. Rose looked back once, but seeing nothing, she shook her head and tried to turn her attention back to her boyfriend.
She only just missed the flash of a long, brown trench coat as it disappeared around the corner.
A/N: Let me know what you think in the reviews! Like I said, second chapter coming soon, as well as the appearance of the Doctor. Thanks for reading!
bad-wolf-and-her-lonely-angel
Stuff from New-Who mentioned in this chapter: The Empty Children, Weeping Angels, Cybermen/Daleks, Cassandra, Cat-People, the Ood, Martha Jones, Donna Noble, Captain Jack Harkness, River Song, Sally Sparrow, Madame du Pompadour, Ursula Blake and Elton Pope, Harriet Jones, and the TARDIS. Of course the guardian angel is the Doctor, who Rose portrays in both the Ninth and Tenth incarnations.