AN: Alright, this another drabble based off of POTW (even though I was more or less inspired by the Torhwood mini-series). Some things to keep in mind when reading this are as follows: All of this happens at a speed faster than that of light, Rose has absolutely no memories of this afterwards, and... What was the other thing?
Oh yeah, I remember. I don't own Doctor Who!
The Reasons for Immortality
"I see everything. All that is… all that was…all that ever could be."
And she could. Every single possibility that the universe held was laid out there in her mind, crystal clear, as if she was there to witness it.
But then again, maybe she was. It was all happening so fast, but she had a hunch that absorbing the entirety of time and space made you more or less omnipresent throughout both.
The things she saw! The Doctor, not as he was now, big ears and leather, but as he would be, brown and maniac smile.
Saw him meet up with an old companion, and save a school her ex-boyfriend called to ask them to look into.
Saw him fall miles down the center of an impossible planet, and face the very creature that the planet's legend was based on.
Saw him watching her get ripped away, and caught by a man who was her father(but at the same time, wasn't) and wept, because she could see other things (so many other things-but never too many, for she was Time and Space itself) and knew that it was necessary, that she could not take action to change it.
Of course, that didn't mean she couldn't make other changes to protect those she cared about.
Like Jack.
She had already taken care of bringing him back to life, but it wouldn't be (hadn't been? She wasn't sure what the proper tense was for something that was both past and future.) enough.
No, he was going to need to be able to survive through much more than the time between now and his next brush with death. A lot longer too, considering how far away he was from the time when he would start to be truly needed.
She watched the years pass, and watched all the times when he would once again meet with death, until she could stand it no longer. (Part of it was from sorrow, though the other part was from sheer annoyance-did he have some kind of secret death wish he hadn't told her and the Doctor about?)
She watched all those times and asked herself each time 'What if he survived? What if he was able to avoid death just enough to live?'
Then she saw something he couldn't possibly survive as a human- getting blown to bits.
Saw it, and wept again, because the events leading up to it were, once again, necessary. Before she had absorbed the time vortex, she knew she would have fought against it, but as the Bad Wolf she knew and understood things that she had not as Rose Tyler.
She knew he would have troubles ahead of him, since she had decided to go ahead and slow down his aging drastically-he was going to be needed almost five billion years into the future in order to save New Earth-but, honestly, did he have to keep rushing headlong into danger like that? He wasn't the Doctor, able to regenerate every time he wanted to avoid dying.
But that thought, that knowledge, gave her an idea. What if, instead of simply slightly changing the events every time Jack was faced with death, she changed Jack himself? Made it so that until he had completed his final task, he could not leave this world?
She searched for it among the possibilities, and found that despite the bitterness and hardship it would cause, it was the best possibility of all those she could find concerning him.
She made the change, and watched as certain events shifted from the category inside her head of 'what could be' to 'what is' and became concrete.
She watched, and for the first time, laughed as she watched the Doctor speak with Jack about his being 'immortal' and how the Doctor said that she couldn't control it.
Laughed, because the Doctor didn't know how wrong he was at that moment.
Laughed, because she, Rose Tyler, Bad Wolf, whatever being she was at the moment, knew exactly what she was doing when she made Jack immortal.