Disclaimer: See Chapter One
Dear Doctor,
Here we are. This is me, Rose Tyler...getting things off my chest. I hope to god you never read this, but I just can't keep it inside my head anymore.
Thinking back to when we first met, in the strangest of settings for the briefest of instants, I can't believe how I kept thinking about you. How I followed you and pestered you and stayed with you, a year and a half ago. Until you took me with you, to walk the heavens with you, shoulder to shoulder. Or so I thought.
Lately, Doctor, I've become aware of so much. At the start it was the wonders of the universe – all of the galaxies, planets and stars stretching into infinity, in moments throughout billions of years in the passage of time. But now...the honeymoon period's over. And I really don't know what to do.
I keep thinking about the first time we ever travelled into the past, when we were trapped in that cellar in Cardiff in 1869, and we both thought we were about to die. You took my hand, just like the first time we met, and despite all the zombies around us...I felt safe. You looked at me, eyes glinting in the gaslight, with a gaze that still makes me melt inside, and said: "I'm so glad I met you". I just wish you would show me that more often – give me a little glimmer of hope that I still mean as much to you as I ever did. Sometimes, I feel so inadequate next to you. Seeing all the things you can do, so well and so effortlessly, I just wonder what you see in an ordinary human. I'm not smart, I'm not strong, and I'm certainly not clever. Sometimes, I feel like your love is wasted on someone as simple as me, and that I'd be lucky for the chance to be on board to do your washing, never mind anything else. It's sad, I know, but...I'd do anything to stay with you, and be useful to you. I just wish you could see that.
You keep going on this path as though you always have. Even after nine hundred years, it's like you just can't live without the next big death-defying thrill, like a drug that forces you to hop from adventure to adventure to get your fix. I wonder what you love more – the adventures, or me. How do you live with it? Taking humans on your travels until they break, or you do, or worse? You engender this trust in people – which saves the Universe, but at what cost?
I mean, sometimes it's a bit more than that trust, isn't it? I wouldn't know if you've always been this good-looking, Doctor, but it's not an inconceivable stretch of the imagination to think of the long line of lovers that you've used and left behind over nine hundred years. And anything which fuels your ego shouldn't be stopped — heaven forbid! Like pre-revolutionary France. One thing Reinette said to me: "You and I both know, don't we, Rose? The Doctor is worth the monsters." I've got to admit, I am beginning to wonder. I wish I'd had the chance to ask her if it really was.
Clive was right. You leave a trail of death and destruction in your wake, because you just can't save everybody, at least not completely. You might be able to save their lives, but what about their livelihoods, and families, and futures, irreversibly altered by the touch of a Time Lord, who almost certainly landed there on impulse? And you never stay long enough to pick up the pieces – whether it's about staying in a given place, or even a given moment, or even one adventure. And I get the feeling there's only so long I can do this for before I fall apart. We're always running, and always looking forwards – but sometimes it would just be nice to look back, once in a while.
Sometimes you're so human and so familiar...but at other times I look at you, and it's as though I don't know you at all. There's a Doctor I've fallen in love with, somewhere inside that body...but I don't always get to see it, even when I really try to bring it out. When I see it, nothing on Heaven or Earth could make me happier, but most times you're just running everywhere, saving the Universe at every stop. I know it's what you do best, and it's what the Universe depends on, but I just wish that sometimes...you could change your priorities, and spend some time with me. Because all good things come to an end. But I'm not even sure that thought, if it occurs to you, even worries you in the slightest. And that kills me.
I worry because of the times you've left me without saying goodbye. Just as you sent me home from the year 200,100, for example. I was sat in London, crying into a plate of chips, while you and Jack were out there fighting for your lives! I felt so helpless, so weak - thank god for the Heart of the TARDIS. And on that stupid message you left me (which, I'm sorry, does not count as a goodbye), you told me to "have a fantastic life". But you never even thought about whether I'd even be able to. If I hadn't found my way back to you, it might well have hung over me for the rest of my life – thoughts of you and Jack, with no clue if you lived or died! How could I have lived a normal life after all I'd seen, and knowing the price I'd paid for it? And let's not forget the time you did it for love, too. I doubt it'll be the last. What was it about Reinette, anyway?! You smashed through the mirror, saved the Universe...and completely forgot me. Was that on purpose?
The thing is, Doctor, you're amazing and brilliant, but could you just be a bit more...human sometimes? Please? That's all I'm asking. Because I really can't carry on like this. I wonder if sometimes you just try and push me away, keeping me at arm's length, and hold back on your emotions because you know we can't last forever. But it's too late – at least, for me.
I wish you'd stop worrying and just love me, because no matter what, I'll always love you. Nothing in the Universe can change that now. I just wish it wasn't this hard.