Disclaimer: Nothing is mine.
--
It's a little over ten years before the impossible becomes the unlikely once again.
Through an accident you can't quite explain and aren't entirely sure you want to know the cause of, you find yourself once again in a world where the skies are full of zeppelins and the sand has taken too many tears.
You'll just wander along this street, you think, give the poor TARDIS a bit of a chance to gather her senses, and then you'll go straight back where you belong. You won't even check if this is her universe (though you knew it the second you walked out of those doors; you have grown to associate the feel of this place with her so strongly that you can almost taste her in the air).
Straight back, you swear, and you really would have kept that promise if you hadn't turned a corner and seen them.
Not believing in fate and knowing the coincidence to be too big, you think the TARDIS must have had a hand in this and don't quite know whether to go back and fix the chameleon circuit as thanks or stay wandering these streets for the next few days and let your ship stew for a while instead, let her think you've given in and gone.
They are standing on an ordinary street, paused outside the double-doorway of a disused shop, and she's taking both of his hands in hers and swinging them nervously about.
He, still in the blue suit you are surprised Rose let him keep, has his back almost completely to you. As for Rose… well, if ten years have passed here, she's not showing it. She's aged since you last walked away and tried to shake the image of her crying from where it is burnt behind your eyelids, certainly, but she can be no more than twenty-five or twenty-six. Her face is at an angle about two degrees too far to the left for you to lip-read and get any real sense of the conversation, but you can see enough to know she calls him Doctor.
Her hair is long, just like when you first met.
When one of his half-human hands reaches, trembling, forwards to rest on Rose's stomach and she nods at him with tears in her eyes, grin wide enough to light the sun, you wish you'd walked the other way.
You'd hoped they'd be alright, be fantastic even, but part of you never wanted them to find this easy.
--
You don't wish hard enough, it seems, because here you are watching them all over again.
It's another eighteen years into their future. Jackie Tyler is dead, and the all-too-perfect couple you saw almost two decades and just over two minutes ago stand around her grave as a family, mourning for a woman you never thought you'd miss.
Rose, her hair shorter now and a much softer blonde, stands the nearest to the unnervingly silent stone, a tiny, beautiful, ginger replica of herself cuddled into her arms as the tears spill down her cheeks. A leg and a foot rest across her swollen tummy, the rest of the child hiding in her mother's shoulder, not quite knowing what all the crying is for. You guess that she is three, and only just.
Behind them, a much older boy – twelve, perhaps, or thirteen – stands next to a much taller, older man who you try not to look at for more reasons than you'd like to admit.
You wonder briefly if this age difference in the children is because they waited – perhaps bringing up one quarter-Time Lord toddler at a time is plenty enough, thankyouverymuch – or because they found it as difficult to have children as you yourself and Rose would have done.
They both have a shock of brown, messy hair and stand with their hands firmly in their pockets (his jeans, his father's suit), both trying to pretend they are not crying for the sake of the still-beautiful woman before them, but that is where the similarity ends. It's not like looking in a mirror, as you had hoped and expected, but in a way it's better than that – humanity has obviously won out, and their son is a spot-the-difference mix of him and Rose and something altogether new you will never be able to define.
You wait until they have gone to venture out into the open of the graveyard and say one final (perhaps you shouldn't use that word so loosely anymore) goodbye to Jackie, the first person who had felt like family to you for a long time.
You tell her you're sorry for keeping Rose away for so long, for driving her mad with worry and never stopping to say thank you for that Christmas dinner, never finding the time to apologise to a woman, so like her daughter, who eventually accepted an alien man into her heart without question.
Half way down the path in front of you, just beyond the grave, the boy takes his sister into his arms and their mother collapses, sobbing, into a lover you never thought would exist.
Even watching from the sidelines is more than you can deal with, separated from Rose as you are by so many years and the multiple barriers around your hearts. This is not your world and will never be your life.
You go back to the TARDIS and close the doors again and this time, you mean it.
--
It's so easy to convince yourself that that sound is something else when you've both been pretending for more than half of your life together that you don't still dream of hearing it. Rose Tyler spent so long jumping at lifts, drills, even strong gusts of wind, that she is no longer too fast to raise her head from the shoulder of the precious second chance the universe has given her.
But for one wild, beautiful moment, when she turns her gaze behind them she swears she sees a flash of blue disappear into the past.