Chapter 11: Searching near Cold Waters

When tomorrow starts without me, don't think we are far apart, for every time you think of me I am right in your heart.
-Anonymous

Rose felt a sudden chill. She opened her eyes slowly and gasped. The world was tearing itself apart. Blackness shrouded the sky and the grass and trees around her were withering away slowly, turning to ash. Shadows danced around her like wolves surrounding their helpless prey.

She sat up slowly, a sickening horror charging through her mind.

"Oh, god."

She turned slowly and watched as the earth began to turn into dust, devoured by an insatiable void. Like dominoes, everything around her fell into the bottomless pit, leaving her trapped on an ever-fading island of dead grass.

The sky split open, a mouth full of sharp, bloody teeth, and a voice of darkness, low and raspy whispered, "Finally, Rose Tyler… you are mine."

Hold on, Rose. Wait for me. I'm going to make this right again.

He paced back and forth, ignoring the silence and the two humans sitting on the metal grating of the control room. Where she is strongest… soul… heart… safe….

"I don't get it," he burst out. "What do you mean? How can she just… just disappearlike that? How can I bring her back from a place where her soul lives? That's not even a real place!"

At least nowhere a physical being can venture.

Her golden eyes followed his mad pacing.

The Doctor froze in his footsteps. "Somewhere where only the mind can go—the soul."

"Doctor, what the bloody hell is going on?" Mickey asked tiredly, standing up and walking over to the Doctor. "Where's Rose?"

"A place where we can't go. Where Death haunts her—has trapped her."

"What?What?"

"But I can find her," the Doctor muttered. "I can find her. I willfind her. Where her heart resides, where she feels safest, where she is strongest."

"What are you going on about?"

"If I can find the place where she feels the safest, where her spirit is at its strongest, where her heart calls home, I can bring her back." The Doctor stared blankly at the wall. "But where? Where is it?

Mickey frowned. "Wait. It's obvious isn't it?"

"What's obvious?"

Mickey rolled his eyes impatiently. "Her heart's true home? Come on, and you call methe stupid one."

"Ri—Mickey, spit it out already!"

"I can't believe I'm reduced to handing out this kind of advice," Mickey muttered, shaking his head. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Your heart."

"What?"

"You, you stupid prat! God, she loved you. Where else would her heart evenconsider calling 'home'? Given the option—well perhaps not in the future, given what happened today—Rose would probably stay with you forever even if all you showed her was death and terror. She loves—loved?—you."

The Doctor looked down at him in surprise. Mickey the Idiot might need a new nickname after today.

"Thanks," Mickey said with a smirk.

The Doctor looked at him in surprise. "Thanks, what?"

"What you said just now," Mickey replied, looking at him as though he had lost his mind.

"Oh." Apparently, he sometimes said what he was thinking out loud.

"Why are you referring to yourself in third person?"

Bollocks. Thinking about how to rescue Rose was really making it hard to multi-task.

"How in the world am I supposed to bring her back from… my heart? How can she even be there? It's not even a place! How can Rose—with her hair and legs and head—be inside of my heart?" He started pacing frantically, pulling at his hair. "What?"

"Maybe it's more metaphorical?"

"What does that mean?" he asked.

Mickey bit his lip. "Maybe she's not really there, there. Maybe… it's just that she's kind of somewhere we can't really find even if we do physically search for her. What if it's just that her heart is kind of… trapped inside yours? No, that's stupid. Wait, I know! What if her feels for you have bound her with your feelings for her? And she's actually somewhere that we will never be able to physically go unless Death drags us there? Like a void or something? Yeah, and all you need to do to bring her back is to find her strongest emotions and convince her to pull herself out." Mickey nodded to himself. "Or something like that," he amended lamely upon seeing the Doctor's incredulous expression.

"Mickey Smith, you are an absolute non-idiot!" the Doctor shouted with a grin.

"Erm… thanks."

"She's not in a place. She's connected to me. I have to reach her mentally and convince her to want to come back, to fight it."

The Doctor grinned. This might not be so difficult after all….

His smile faded. "She has to want to come back." To this life. To here. To me.

Less than two months before, he could have said with confidence that of course Rose Tyler would choose me. Of course, she would, because she would fight her way through hell itself to come hold my hand again so that she could protect me. Now, everything had changed. She knew what it was like to not be his everything. She felt that he didn't love her—that somehow, he never had. She didn't lose faith in him—she had lost faith in them.

Meeting Sarah Jane had been like being doused with cold water for her. This last adventure had been like being shoved onto a thinly frozen lake for her, trying to accommodate him—as she had always had to do—while trying futilely to find a safe way back to shore…. And she had fallen because of his actions. And what was left of her once strong love shattered, dispersing through the cold while he had stood on shore, oblivious.

When he flounced back to her with Reinette in tow, he didn't even notice the change in Rose. How she was more distant and less reachable, covered with an invisible armor he would never have been able to penetrate even if he had noticed and tried. She had learned to protect herself against him.

Oh, Rose… what have I done?