As he sat, he remembered.
He had needed her. She became the sun and the balance to his dark life.
Where he saw journeys and adventures, possibilities for excitement, Rose saw souls. Oh, she reveled in the excitement as well, but she perceived so much more than that.
Rose saw people, and knew that they were like her, knew that they were hurting, and needed someone to care. They were the little people, no great leaders, no celebrities among them.
He gravitated toward the great ones, while his strange flower faced those in the shadows.
The Doctor-who-was would have passed by, missed their significance.
They were nothing special. They could not see the turn of worlds as he could, could not possibly understand his pain. They were not important.
He would not have seen how the human soul suffered and lived, how their lives filled with starshine and death and joy and children, as their world turned.
He had forgotten. Those he encountered may have seemed poor and plain and obscure, but such perceptions by no means meant that they were soulless and heartless as well.
He met a girl.
A teenage shopgirl from 21st century London with a penchant for heavy mascara, fish and chips; she was the Rose who saw to their hearts, and who cut to his through his glass cover.
She struck him to the bone. A fiery flower bloomed in his hearts, melting and breaking and causing the flow of fresh, achingly alive blood.
Rose found the lost ones, the hurting, and she showed the Doctor what it was to feel their hurt again.
He had closed off empathy, had never wished to feel.
Rose cared.
So he learned to care again.
And he lost her
He lost his hearts
again.
So he took the pain; he took the suffering and the new loss which cut like a frozen blade through his blood, and he gathered it with the raw memories of love rediscovered;
as he regenerated he threw all that into one heart
the heart that was breaking always had been breaking forever be broken for his Rose
so he could imagine a future without pain
strangely, locking her away gave him hope
she was a rose
a burning flower in his blood and bones
she was his only home
He lay on his side in the golden bed. The pillow smelled like the most intoxicating of perfumes, as though he was close enough to smell her hair once again.