A/N: After crying for hours over Doomsday, I found Ten trying to take over my pen as I sat down to write. Here's the product, and I hope I did Ten's feelings justice! I do not own Doctor Who or any of the characters, no matter how much I wish I did.

Allons-y! ~


I'm no stranger to emptiness, the spawn of loneliness and self-loathing. Try losing all of your people. Even in the most absolute of silences the screaming never stops; the curse of the last Time Lord. Maybe it's what I deserve, really. You see so much death and destruction, and cause a great deal of it, so maybe its-what does that human religion call it?-karma.

Then why do the Daleks always reappear in such vast numbers? Bred for murder and yearning for only the brutality of war, what allows them to live? Perhaps no truer word has been spoken than the simple phrase "life isn't fair." Don't I know it. Just when I think I'm ridden of the Daleks and the bloody cybermen, there they are! Do they exist to prove me wrong?

No, no of course not, that's a very self-centric point of view, isn't it? I'm nothing more than a nomad voyaging through the streams of space and time. The universe, in all its ever-changing eccentrics, does not need me. Everyone is important, but no one is everything. Even Rose Tyler, defender of the Earth, is no larger than a grain of sand in the grand scheme of things.

But she was- is-so much more than that to me. I can see all of time and space in my head. It was once cloaked in darkness and my own anger and defeat, but then she ignited the stars. It was like, for the first time in so very long, the universe I looked upon, despite its corruptness and inadequacies…was beautiful.

Now my hearts ache and it burns a chasm that threatens to engulf me, like the sun I burned to say goodbye.

I'm not reckless, like the protagonist of a cheesy novel; just determined. Rose tyler opened my eyes again to see the beauty in everything. Shutting down or throwing my life away would do no justice to all that she was. I know that she's righting wrongs and doing brilliant things in her own universe, too; for after all, if I believe in one thing, I believe in her.

Also unlike those sappy novels, I have direction. My purpose has not changed, just my outlook on it. Journey the heavens, save those I can, lament those I can't. Ironic, really, that once called The Doctor only endangers those close to him.

She's not dead, though. Rose has her mum and dad and Mickey…She's safer now, without me, I frequently remind myself.

Yet I still feel so cold when I reach out my hand to hers and find only air.