Title: Everything has its Time (2/8)
Pairing: Rose/Ten
Spoilers: Set after 'Age of Steel'
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Mystery
Rating: Teen for mature writing style
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and make no financial profit from this writing, just other kinds of profit!

Summary: Rose realises that it isn't the loss of Mickey that's hurting her but the feeling that she's lost the Doctor. One random morning on board the good ship T.A.R.D.I.S., Rose says the one thing she never thought she would ever say.

Chapter 1.

"Doctor it's time you took me home."

If hearts could do a double take his just did, both of them personifying themselves in their erratic 'Samba' rhythm.

The Doctor, who had been sprawled haphazardly over one side of the bed and half spilling onto the floor suddenly backed up and straightened as if burnt.

Like soaring too close to the Sun, the Doctor lived playing with fire and yet there was always surprise when it hurt. He was like a child realising for the very first time the dangers of a naked flame and for a moment that look of surprise and betrayal marred his carefully controlled features before he resolutely schooled his visage back to adulthood. The adult who remembers his lessons, remembers the pain, remembers these words, 'Take me home' but they sound foreign in his ears, like a fault in the translation circuits because the voice sounds like Rose Tyler, Dame Rose of the Powell Estate, Defender of the Earth, his Rose.

For a moment he wonders why he isn't laughing and joking at her tease but there's something there in her voice, her eyes, her face or rather something missing. Rose hasn't moved even with his startled reaction. She's somehow still holding his gaze and there's regret there, shock even and a maturity and calm that even he, at nine hundred years her senior, doesn't feel.

So this is how they're playing it? The requisite serious discussion, the packing, custody rights to their home, (hardly going to be contested) and the goodbye, the goodbye he's not ready to hear. But he's played this part many times before and already the conventional and safe, scripted dialogue is lining up for its cue. His expressions are training themselves into ones of patience, seriousness and understanding and he's bending his knee and coming to rest facing her on the bed.

When she sees these well practised actions she falters slightly beginning to fidget. She's aware that this is an act, the last scene before the final curtain and is suddenly aware of his years and how many reprisals of this role he must have made and feels a sickening guilt and stubbornness born out of the 'I told you so' in his eyes because she had laughed and thoughtlessly promised him forever when for him it was just a matter of Time.

In that instant, that realisation, she literally felt herself grow up like when you expect to feel suddenly older on the day of your birthday as if Time would change you so much between yesterday's midnight and today's dawn.

"Why?" He says because she's expecting him to ask and because he knows that she needs to tell him what he already knows and perhaps every time he hopes that he doesn't. You're dangerous. You're a murderer. I need to settle down or I'll be old and lonely and have no life outside in the REAL world. This is Rose Tyler, his fantastic, intelligent, inquisitive Rose, Oh let her surprise him just one last time.

"Because it's Time." There is a dullness and acceptance about the words and he thinks that she too is only going through the motions which make these words history even as they are being spoken. They should just leave, the decision made, but he can't bring himself not to stay and act a little longer.

"Time? Did I mention it also travels in Time? Time machine! Time Lord!" He gestures manically. "It can be any Time you want?"

She's smiling at him fondly but a shake of the head says, 'not this time'.

"Or no Time then. Can't we just be out of Time of a while? Just suspended in…" He shakes his head and closes his mouth strangely bereft and deflated. "…no Time." He finishes lamely and whispered almost like a prayer and he's still, he's staring at nothing or maybe something, something very important, something very real, something only he can see and then he's off again jumping off the bed with borrowed but familiar energy and heading for the door, almost running.

"No Time! No time like the present, right? Or past rather, or future depends how far we've drifted, yeah?"

He turns to smile at her; she hasn't moved; she's almost statuesque. He almost reaches for his sonic to see if the universe could be so kind, can keep her frozen until he figures out the right words to make her take it back.

His smile falters and he does something that he promised he never would (Always their choice) but he needs more, just a bit of a rise, a reaction. This dignified mute is not his Rose. He needs to know that she feels…feels something?

"Is it because of Mickey?" He blurts out.

"A little." She sighs as if expecting this. Surely she hasn't grown that accustomed to his mercurial shifts in mood?

I didn't realise but it started before I lost Mickey. It started when I lost you. And there it was. It wasn't the time travelling, alien landscapes the swashbuckling and running that gave her life more meaning than Henricks and poor old Wilson it was him and he'd gone and left her. Oh he was still physically here but after Sarah and Reinette and five and a half hours his very solidity seemed transient and growing in translucency like she was looking through merely an image of the man without depth, her perspective was now so altered.

She stands and pulls her rucksack from under the bed. She starts to fill it, not paying much attention to the task.

"You know it was his choice, right? What he wanted? Mickey the Idiot turning into Mickey the Man and needing to feel needed. That's so human."

"You think I didn't need him? That it's my fault that he didn't feel needed?"

He's quiet. He hadn't meant to suggest…but at least this is talking.

"If you didn't think I needed him then why invite him along? Huh?"

"He'd proved myself; not just the tin dog." That wistful tone riling Rose all the more as the Oncoming Storm made her feel like the hysterical woman exploding in a storm in a teacup.

"So? You didn't need him, always taunting him with that massive Time Lord brain of yours and you didn't need Sarah-Jane and you don't need me. I'm sick of being your chew toy, bringing some light relief and amusement."

Rose knew this was stupid but it felt like the T.A.R.D.I.S. was holding her breath waiting for something to happen so 'words, words, words' happened; words that made her voice break a little more than she hoped he noticed.

"Is that what this is about? Sarah-Jane? Are you jealous?" He strode over to her, eyes wild and hand halting hers, trying not to notice her grip going knuckle white on a pile of knickers.

"Oh don't be so simple! It's beneath you." She shoved him off.

"Me? You're the one that's jealous over my past. I'm nine hundred years old Rose, that's a lot of history, a lot of travelling. You're the one that's choosing to be a simple shop girl, stuck on a simple planet in a simple time…"

"Well I suppose it's not seventeenth century Versailles…"

Her hand shot to cover any other bitterness erupting because she wasn't leaving because she was bitter; she was leaving because she wasn't, not anymore.

"That was different." He bit back.

"Yeah, it was. Very different. You were so…different." She quieted the fight flown from her.

"Reinette…" (Still she felt herself start slightly at the name.) "…had a huge role to play in the history of your world. I had to save her to preserve the timelines. Protect and serve that's me. How was that different in fact I think I'm getting too 'the same', too predictable, maybe it's time to shake things up again, try a different garden vegetable! A tuber; great word tuber or how about a ridiculously long scarf though the ridiculously long coat is easy enough to trip on that's why I had to compensate with the converse seeing as how jeopardy friendly my companion is…was. Is that it? Am I boring? Rude, not ginger and boring? Old war veteran syndrome? Check on the war, check on the old, weeellll, that's relative but if I was your relative I'd be relatively dead at lead ten times over. Just one to go then and I'll be dead to you."

He was pacing and ruffling and even Rose was starting to fear for his mental state but she also knew him and knew this and this was deflecting.

"It WAS different…" She cleared her throat and he spun to look at her, slightly crestfallen that she hadn't bought his rouse.

"It was different because this time you left me behind like the tin dog, like the 'stupid ape', like last year's sonic screwdriver. Typical man; they see something shiny and new and…"

"I'm not a man, Rose."

"Yeah, maybe I finally realise that." She stilled looking tired, even though she was still in her P.J.s.

"You are so much to so many Doctor but you're not enough to me 'cause in some ways even Mickey could give me more than you could even with the T.A.R.D.I.S. and the stars, maybe that's why you love humans. You're jealous because you can never love like a human."

"Seems like you're the one that's got tired of her shiny new toy. You all use me and you leave. What more can you possibly want from me?"

With that scathing reply he hoisted her pack onto his shoulder and stormed out of the room heading for the console.

Rose stood there empty and exhausted. She shouldn't have said that; that's why she didn't want to argue because things 'get said'. He was enough; he was more than enough; in fact he was too much and maybe that was the problem; he was far too much to ever belong to just one person.

She let go and calmed down. This is how she would leave him; how Rose and the Doctor in the T.A.R.D.I.S. would end, not in a bang but with a whimper.

She breathed.

Thirty seconds later the T.A.R.D.I.S. pitched violently to the left and she fell; a shower of sparks bursting from her overhead mirror light as her head collided with the glass. It splintered and cracks grew like in the future, or past, at Canary Wharf, the holes of the universe, growing, expanding like the holes in her heart.

A smear of blood seeped into the newly forming fissures and she watched it pool as she fell unconscious.

When she woke up some time later it wasn't the dried blood, the splitting headache or pricks of glass that disturbed her most, it was that she was cold, it was so dark and all around her was nothing but deafening silence.