In your eyes I would hide
By your side I could defy
The forces tearing us apart
But reality, as it seems
Looking back, is that our dream
Was fated from the start
Ash, "Starcrossed"

Rose's TARDIS sat in its usual spot, on the overgrown lawn between a brick wall and the sidewalk on a corner of the Powell Estate. The sun shone through the leaves of a nearby tree, and a breeze swept through Rose's shoulder-length hair. She sat on the patch of grass to the right of the TARDIS, her back against the blue wood, her side pressed to the brick wall and her black boots nearly reaching the concrete of the sidewalk. She zipped her red hoodie up a little more and remembered a time when she wasn't so alone.

Not that she wasn't surrounded by people all the time. She had her parents and her brother, Mickey and Jake and people from work. But her parents had each other and their finding of each other was still new after two years. And hanging out with Mickey and Jake was a little too third wheel for her, as much as she loved them and they tried.

And so she had the TARDIS. She cut back to part-time at Torchwood and filled her days with learning the intricacies of the various knobs, dials and mallets of the console and enough rudimentary Gallifreyan to understand the display screen and coordinate where she wanted to go. She went to night classes and took Physics and History and Astronomy and an art class in the hopes it'd help her be able to write the complex circles of the Gallifreyan language a little better.

And at night, after all was said and done, she went to bed in her room in the TARDIS and dreamed of her Doctor. Most of the time it was her thin, brunet, geek-chic suit-clad Doctor, although sometimes it was a slightly less pretty man with a Northern accent and a leather jacket. But every once in a while, she'd dream different men, most often a man with a riot of brown curls and the longest scarf she'd ever seen in her life. Sometimes the man was old, sometimes he was young, sometimes blonde, sometimes brunet, sometimes grey, sometimes he had some really ridiculous clothing... no, oftentimes, but sometimes more so than others. But he was always her Doctor. And she lived her monotonous days for her dreams and the hope that she would see him again.

A single tear made its way past her mascara-coated eyelashes and trickled down her cheek. And she unconsciously leaned a little to the right and tangled her hand in the grass. She could only hope he wasn't as lonely as she was.