A Flower Out Of the Rain

At this moment, all of Time and Space bows to her will, to this rather insignificant little being. Her name echoes across voids and lightnesses. She will crush her enemies. She will protect those she loves.

It is that simple. Rose Tyler loves her Doctor. That love has brought her here, to have light gleaming along every inch of her frail human self.

She reaches out into Time. How complex it is! How simple it is to understand! Centuries and millennia pass in a beat of her heart.

But oh, just there. Something is There. That blue box, that box with all its wonders inside, is in peril. Inside she sees the Doctor, but not the Doctor. Not the one she loves now, not the one who stares up at her, awestruck by her devotion to him. No, this Doctor is the one before her own, flying around his TARDIS controls at a breakneck speed, shouting and screaming.

An explosion rocks the TARDIS, and fires break out along the console. The Doctor spins away, curls flying, grabbing a fire extinguisher, but as he does so there is another explosion. He is knocked off his feet into the console, and Rose senses his pain as his forehead bleeds profusely onto his frilled coat.

Another explosion, and the TARDIS wheezes in pain. Her master, pressing his coat to his head to slow the bleeding, struggles to reach every button in order to steer her out of danger, to keep his ship flying.

Rose knows that he will fail-she can see it. His TARDIS will fall down into the temporal void left from the loss of Gallifrey. He will die. She will never meet him, never travel with him, never risk her life to glow along every inch of her human self out of love for him.

It cannot be. It will not be.

Rose gathers her power, waning now as the seconds pass, and cups that tiny blue box as the shock waves resound through all of time and space. She holds him safe inside, like a flower out of the rain, protecting her precious Doctor as he pours what's left of his eighth life into a smoking and smouldering TARDIS.

Rose lets go as she sees the Doctor's eighth self dissolve into his ninth in the past, and she falls into his arms in the present, just a human once again, just a young human girl in love with the Doctor, who would do anything to save him. And so she has.