How many tears are shed for someone who still goes on living day after day apart from you? I stopped counting. How long is appropriate to mourn someone who hasn't died, just gone?
I spent nearly four months lamenting, using my mother and father's falling in love (it's complicated) and conceiving a child as a measuring stick until the night I had the dream. The night I dreamt of a voice I thought I'd never hear again. I'd dreamt of him before, seen his face as I mentally recounted all of our adventures. These dreams reminded me of intimate touches that I would never really feel again, foxy glances inappropriately exchanged while we faced imminent death.
Nothing quite prepares you for it, any of it, really. Death, love… it's all a mystery until you feel it, truly feel it. Before I met the Doctor, death was such a finite thing. But I fell in love with a man who could change his face, his entire personality in death. Love before the Doctor was so simple. Mickey and me, we just sort of worked. We were boring at times, spending entire days doing nothing at all. I didn't know that wasn't true love until I met someone I would truly die for and did in a way…
He used to be more than dreams to me but that isn't something I can really dwell on. We're under impossible circumstances, sort of stranded from one another. But if there's one thing he taught me to believe in it's that impossible is nothing to the stuff of legends.
So I dreamt that night, his disembodied voice penetrating my thoughts telling me that we would get the chance to see each other again. He gave me coordinates and a time and I knew this wasn't just a dream. Just like that, he defied death once more, reaching out to me beyond hope or reason. I went to him, we all did. Mum, Dad, Mickey, we packed up and did just as he said. The red around my eyes from crying had barely had a chance to stop stingin' and I was going to see him again.
Just as the time approached, he seemed to materialize right in front of me. The cold air from the Norwegian beach could barely touch the warmth that filled me when I saw his face once more. He appeared not all there as if he hadn't fully downloaded but in light of our predicament I was grateful for what we did get.
We got goodbye. We got pithy banter and to cry together at how unfair it all was. We could fight alongside one another, be content together but the universe would rather see us apart. Maybe the universe knew the force we would become. That's how I like to think of it, at least.
Before our two minutes were up, I found myself dumbfounded at my lack of words. But then I found what I needed to say buried under posh pretenses and playful detachedness. Under the cover of tears I choked out "I love you". He'd always known, he didn't need to hear it. I had shown him with my insistence to never leave his side, to never leave him alone. I had proven it to him each time I risked injury or death beside him.
That's the thing about love. It manifests itself in different ways for different people. The Doctor had something left to say on that beach. Something the universe also wouldn't allow. He faded from me imparting only my name. He had shown me his capacity for love when he tried to keep me out of harm's way, when he spared me some of the darker realities of his travelling. It was on that beach that I realized while some things don't need to be said, "I love you" was not one of them.
After he dissipated, I cried once more, comforted in the arms of everyone I knew in that alternate world but still feeling dejected and empty. How far I'd come from the 19 year-old girl who worked in the shop to the "brave child who would die in battle" only to regress into a crying idiot when the universe finally gave me a steadfast "no".
It was then that I realized, standing on Bad Wolf Bay that I was Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth. More important than that, I could inhale the whole of the time vortex, I could split every atom of a Dalek, the time lord's most loathsome enemy, and I could spread words across the universe, echoes of myself always leading me back to the Doctor. I could face death and come out on the other side unscathed. Nothing was impossible for me.
The Doctor was like the sun, he was the warm glow that brings a smile to your face as well as the blinding light that left you squinting in it's wake but he taught me a better life. He taught me not to give up, even when it could mean life or death and he taught me I could do anything. Even bring two universes crashing together if I needed to so I set to work. Dumb luck had brought us together once and I, the Bad Wolf, brought us together again. It would not be the last time.