A/N: Part Three of my Forever Cycle... enjoy!
Disclaimer: Plot and nothing else would be mine... shame.
At Her Age
The universe is an odd place. A Wilderness, wild and feral and desolate. A mother's soft, caring embrace. A lover's electric touch, and a seducer's expert caress. All jumbled together in the darkness.
Rose knows this, or thinks she does. She thinks that she knows what the universe could possibly perhaps be. One day, maybe. Or yesterday.
She just doesn't know what it is yet.
I
When she was six months old, Rose Tyler met loss for the first time.
She saw it in her mother's face- Grief, Pain, Anger.
Because her dad was dead; and yet he lived on, in the shadows underneath her mother's eyes. Even when he wasn't there anymore, his name was forever on the edges of Jackie's lips, the periphery of all her sentences.
He remained, long after the accident, and yet he was not there. Existing enough to make Jackie incapable of forgetting and moving on, but not enough for her to remember how to smile again.
Rose Tyler's childhood orbited Pete Tyler.
II
At three, Rose killed a worm.
She stabbed at it with a spade, curious to see what happened when this wriggling pink thing that had appeared from the earth and was utterly disgusting was cut in half.
She watched it writhe around, and did not like it.
It set alight some recently inactive feelings that she didn't know what to make of.
When the worm finally stopped moving, Rose wondered why. Why it so suddenly stilled, after minutes of struggling to cling to the fabric of its life, it had chosen to give up and let go.
She sat in the mud and pondered why-and how- things knew when it was right to let go.
III
At five, Rose's Aunty Meredith became the Dearly Beloved.
As they stood in the rain, in a garden with black, square flowers with their funny etchings, Rose wondered quietly to herself why her Aunty had wanted to go to sleep, here in the rain and the mud. And why, of all places, in a plain, dark wooden box.
Her mother explained to her that Meredith was Dead.
Rose stood, her arms itching from the raw cotton of her horrible black dress, goosebumps rising as rain continued to turn her hair into scraggly rat tails, and wondered. She looked around the semi-circled of sad, broken people, and she wondered what Dead meant.
IV
Four years later, and she realised this concept of 'grief', and 'loss' was a world wide thing.
People, everywhere- every colour, every nationality, every height and weight and character, they all hurt, and they all faded into distant memories.
For the first time, at the ago of nine and a bit, Rose Tyler was afraid.
A deep, gnawing fear that bubbled up inside her, and she did not like it. There was this horrible feeling on the faces of people around her- behind the laughs and the tears and the smiles, she saw it. The fear of the darkness and what it brought.
She could not run from it.
Couldn't hide.
She couldn't sob into her mother's arms, because, Rose realised then, that one day, her mother would be just like the others, and become just tantamount to the expressions of the faces of these people around her daughter.
It was then that Rose realised not even Jackie, her beloved mother, could protect her from everything.
V
At twelve, Rose sat on her window, watching the rain, and missed her father.
He was the thing that everyone else had, and yet she didn't even have memories.
Why did other girls her age have dads who took them shopping and bought them clothes and teddy bears and helped them with homework? Why did they deserve to still have their dads, when Rose had never had hers?
How was that fair, and who decided it?
Rose didn't know. Didn't know, and probably never would.
She screamed and threw her things about; turning her room into her all her rage and pain and jealousy and confusion depicted.
And then she cried.
Cried for all the memories she could've made; all the conversations she and her daddy would never, ever have. Cried for all the people out there, past her window and the rain, who were exactly like her, and also couldn't have been more different. Let all her tears spill out, finally allowed to. Because it wasn't fair.
At twelve, she realised nothing was.
VI
At thirteen, she started to get noticed.
Eyes followed her in the corridors at school. Boys sidled up to her and started conversations with her.
And Rose Tyler felt odd.
These people- their male minds so superficial, so superfluous that she was boggled by their sheer mannerisms. She did not understand them at all.
Why, after all this time, were they interested in her now?
Well, the obvious answer was the boys were thirteen and by now, their one-track minds were almost fully developed.
But it was deeper than that.
In time, Rose came to understand it was because she was a novelty.
She was the quiet girl with only one parent. Whose mother had been depressed whilst she was growing up.
That was why the conversations, she found, always ended with the same sentences- spoken from different mouths, but identical, rebounding off of her like a boomerang. Again and again and again, and yet hitting her deeper every time.
Until she snapped.
She was suspended, but Jake Reid still has the three tiny scars just below his ear, inflicted by her then inch-long fingernails. He had only asked her why her parents weren't married.
She wasn't asked again.
VII
At fifteen, Rose Tyler got taken advantage of.
His name was Jimmy Stone, and he was Older, therefore desired by every one of her friends.
But he'd chosen her, because Rose was confused, still stuck on the whys and hows of her existence, and easily led astray.
And fifteen found her pressed against a wall as Jimmy groaned and writhed in front her, his hands deep under her shirt, thinking that if this was what teenagers were told strictly not to do, that this was the last path she had to cross into adulthood, then it was very much elaborated.
VIII
At sixteen, Rose thought that maybe her life wasn't all deep ponderings and cryptic half thoughts after all, and maybe, just maybe, one quiet London girl with no dad and a sad mum could be allowed to love someone.
Because, although Jimmy wasn't always caring, or nice to her, or romantic or anything that the princes in fairytales were supposed to be, he was all Rose had. He was there often enough, and he gave her focus in life. She'd been drifting through it, following along after everyone else as the years dripped by, never stopping to wonder if this was, in fact, it.
IX
At seventeen, Rose Tyler got her heart broken.
Her universe shrunk, receding into a tiny chasm that didn't allow even the barest flicker of light into it. Jimmy faded away, to become, later on, as just a bitter memory, but at the time he tore her life apart. Her focus, her aspiration, was gone. Her one and only fixed point had abandoned her, ripping himself away and tearing huge gaps in her grasp of what was real and what was fictitious.
She retreated back into her drifting, because it was all that was left.
X
At seventeen, Rose Tyler took advantage.
He was a lovely boy, Mickey. Lovely, lovely, lovely.
But that was just what he was; a lovely boy.
Older than her and so deemed acceptable, but too lovely, too smitten by her. Rose did not connect with him. And so she drifted, under the pretence- to everyone around her, but also to herself- that she was Happy.
XI
At nineteen, Rose's world exploded.
Colours washed back into it, her entire take on everything that she had ever deemed debatable, swept away in the blinding rainbow of prospect and brightness and hope.
Her world, expanded in fireworks of flashing colours and brightness and the impendingness of something new and better and proper. All that, in a split second, the barest touch of a different hand. A single, hushed word that meant more to Rose than everything else ever said in all her nineteen years in a place she couldn't understand.
"Run!"
And then there he was. The Doctor.
He ran into her world and then never stopped sprinting, dragging her along in a flurry of cheery grins and sarcasm and mixed up potential.
Everything she had lost faith in, such a very long time ago, all squashed into one single person. Shaping her with his smiles, his laugh, his voice. Slowly but surely altering every single cell of her body until she wasn't some random, confused teenager anymore. She was everything that she had forgotten to feel.
Happiness, joy, hope, faith, everything Rose Tyler had let go of, and had chosen instead to bury herself under a torrent of anguish and tears for a world she didn't know, and also wouldn't let herself try to.
XII
At twenty one, Rose saw everything.
What could be, what couldn't; what will and what must never, ever be. Saw it all in a single night. Everything, and things beyond that, stretching away into the darkness of Time itself. The end of universes, the start of the next; the one before, the one after. The cell that started it all, and the one that ended it. The spark, flaring in the darkness, and the one that dwindled away until there was only the darkness again, waiting patiently for that next flare.
And she did it for him.
The lost sentences, the words that were spoken too many times, the regret in the heart and the laughter on the lips, a thousand billions pinpricks of light in a drawing board, condemned forever to sizzle into life with a zest to life, the breathe, to survive, only the be choked away again. The endless circles, the rules, the rewards the punishments the never-ending cycles of time and space and universes. And Rose understood.
For once in her life, she knew.
Everything she'd sought for, everything she'd ever wanted to know, laid out before her to pick and choose from on a whim.
And then the beautiful light of time itself; the beauty of it that no-one would- could- ever see. Except her. Bathing in it, soaking in it, drowning, drowning, drowning…
Because beauty hurts, Rose realised, as she drowned and cried and whooped with joy at the sheer peacefulness of knowing that everything would keep on going, with or without her, and that no matter how hard you pleaded or begged or tried, you couldn't ever change it.
But why would you? It was better this way.
The anger, the grief, the panic, the hate. Melded together with the love and the lust and the desire and the frustration and the excitement. To hold your tiny child in your arms; how wonderful it must really be, Rose thought as she screamed into the fire, not yet able to decide whether it was scream of pain or happiness. To look at his face and smile and feel your heart swell with pride and love and everything that was good about the world. And then to hold him again as he closes his eyes, properly, the finality of the simple gesture something you cannot comprehend. The simplicity of the movements, the thoughts and the wonders you can see, if only you'd open your eyes…
And then lips on hers, taking her away from the people and the places and thoughts and the arguments and everything that was wrong and so very, very right about the universe.
Dragging her back. Saving her. Killing her.
XIII
At twenty one, Rose lost a friend.
The man who showed her so much, who helped her and hated her and loved her and saved her. Gone, gone, gone forever and ever.
Never stopping, never faltering, never stumbling. Because his footsteps were already over.
XIV
At twenty one, Rose Tyler gained a friend.
A man so the same, and so different. Difference was a simple word. Wrong and perfect in equal measure as her universe shrunk and melded and recovered and grew again.
All in his hands.
The hands that were his, and so many other people's. Hers, too. As she stared into the eyes of not one, but twelve people, and she smiled and realised that universes could end and start again but the Doctor would always be the same.
XV
At twenty two, Rose Tyler felt something that she had never felt before.
Love.
So strong and crushing, it fuelled her every movement, her every thought and feeling and action. It glowed behind her eyes whenever he looked at her, and made her heart beat with want, and desire, jealousy and pain in equal measure. Making her chest ache with bitterness as other, better women looked at him- jealousy- and then subsequent want as he looked away from them and never looked back. Swell with pride and ownership as he looked away from them, to her, and then never tore his gaze away.
At twenty two, Rose Tyler realised she was wanted- not for her life story, or for her body, but for her.
At twenty two, she allowed herself to be vulnerable.