PRODIGALS
TWENTYONE
The two women sitting at a table drinking lattes in the local Starbucks had formed an unlikely friendship.
The girl from the Estate, like thousands of others brought up by a single mother, toughened by the state school system, educated on the streets, employed in the shops after she left school at 16; and the tomboy whiz kid who'd been raised by intellectual parents, surrounded by privileged academics, at a too-young age set on a harrowing course few could successfully navigate, eventually forging a place for herself inside the ivory towers.
Yes, opposites attract. And yet despite their differences they shared great commonalities – each had found something in the other that was missing from her own life. For Wil Beinert, it was the beloved sister who'd been taken from her so tragically, so unexpectedly. For Rose Tyler, the sibling she'd always wanted but never got.
But they shared more than that. Both had recently watched the men who'd changed their lives walk away from them.
And neither of them knew how to talk about it.
That was the hurdle. For Rose Tyler it was talking about someone and something that she'd never talked to anyone about before, ever. It frightened her to reveal the nature of her unusual relationship with The Doctor, to disclose those feelings and fears that she kept so close to her heart. To acknowledge that the relationship, although incredibly loving, was not what it sometimes appeared to be – that it was indeed as they frequently insisted: not intimate. And for Rose, what really made it difficult to talk about was that the reality was really truly actually okay. It wasn't that she merely accepted the situation, or that she settled for it, or even that she was biding her time waiting and hoping and praying for it to change. Nor was the intimacy something she missed or yearned for or hurt over. It just didn't matter. At first, when The Doctor had the body of another man, a different man, and it was very early on in their association and she was still so very, very young, she'd wondered about it… played with the thought in her mind, and even fantasized about it; about him. But then there came a time when it just didn't matter. And she was irrationally terrified to be judged by it – for someone to think something was wrong with her or him or the two of them.
She had come to believe that no one in the universe could understand.
But she was mistaken. Wil understood.
And over the days of talk and coffee Wil patiently extracted the story out of Rose, and accepted and embraced her friend and did not judge her. Nor did she express surprise or shock or disbelief or pity. From Wil came only appreciation and support and… and this was important, a sort of intellectual context that Rose then took and organically incorporated into herself. This enlightenment arrived in the form of a long discussion one afternoon on the nature of the Platonic ideal of love. Rose had, of course, heard of Plato, but Wil had intensely studied him at length, in the original ancient Greek (of course!), and over the years she'd spent a lot of time thinking about the Platonic form of a chaste but passionate love; a love meant to bring the lovers closer to wisdom, beauty and spirituality. As a female in a predominantly male scientific world she'd come to embrace the concept and, in fact, apply it. It had served her well.
"Rose," Wil said near the end of this particular discussion, "what really matters is that you are happy, but you should know that what you have achieved with The Doctor has been sought after and idealized since ancient times. You should never feel ashamed or embarrassed about what the two of you have attained. It is special and extraordinary, just as the two of you are special and extraordinary. Never let anyone ever tell you differently."
Her long talks with Wil had liberated and healed Rose in ways she'd not expected. She missed The Doctor terribly and talking about him, laughing about him, and even crying about him were incredibly therapeutic. Sharing her extraordinary secret had been cathartic – and even though she had initially trusted Wil, at least to a point, she'd indeed been truly frightened to reveal that secret; and its disclosure had been phenomenally difficult for her. But it was nowhere nearly as difficult as what Wil would experience when the conversational spotlight turned and focused on her.