to the guest who said they wanted more: I'm planning to continue this and turn it into a reunion fic! I talked briefly about it in the author's note on it on ao3 and feel free to message me with anything you think would be interesting to see in a continuation! I'm open to prompts :)
They don't grow old together. She's bitter about it most of the time sometimes.
("You'll grow old at the same time as me?"
"Together.")
He holds her hand and says forever and it doesn't work out that way. She clings to him and says forever but she blinks and he's gone and she visits him in the cemetery outside London on Sundays.
It wasn't fair. (Life has never been fair.)
It's been years, decades, and she still gets angry; breaks down and screams and sinks under the water in the bath and cries when her lungs can go longer without air than they used to, because her body isn't as human as it used to be, and his forever looked so different than hers does.
She looks at the human name on his grave and carves his real one in circular Gallifreyan into the stone with a torx-head screwdriver because it looks like a star and he'd have found that funny.
She blinks and there's another grave; her mother goes gently, in her sleep. Then she blinks again and the stone has enough room for another name; her father is gone. That's twice now, that she's buried him.
Her brother lives a little longer, but his husband dies before he does and he never really recovers. Rose is reminded of their mother as she watches Tony grieve and knows that he will never love like that again. The look in his eyes is almost hauntingly the same as the one she grew up trying to soothe.
(She figures she probably wears that look too, now.)
She keeps an eye on their children, but both are all grown up and out in the world, and she still looks like a twenty-one-year-old girl who hasn't settled. And she hasn't. She drifts around the city, a new apartment every other year, boxes that never get unpacked. Abandoned projects at Torchwood, a PhD she started and will never finish. (Still no A-Levels.)
They don't need her. They're the only family she has left, and they send their Christmas cards to her office because they don't even know where she lives. She feels like a ghost, because it's easier for them to bury her away than explain to their families who she is, why she stays the same when the rest of the world is moving. Why she even exists when she's not supposed to.
More years drag by, linear and slow. She aches for home, for the universe where she never felt like a guest. (The universe where he's still alive and traveling the stars.)
But she's already tried to go home. She clawed her way through a tear in reality because he was on the other side and the stars were going out, and he sent her back.
She thinks she's allowed to be angry at all the choices that were made for her, even if she wouldn't trade the years she got with her husband for anything. But time went on, and the anger faded. He had one heart instead of two and always complained about how weird it felt, but he was still the Doctor. She loved him.
They didn't get enough time; they barely got any.
("How long are you going to stay with me?"
"Forever.")
Funny, how a lord of time should get so little.
She wears her wedding rings on the chain with her TARDIS key, now. She was a wife for thirteen years; she's been a widow for so much longer.
Rose misses the TARDIS.
Sometimes she stops, completely still, and for a moment her head feels overwhelmingly empty without the presence of the ship, humming to her. It's a small feeling, like something is just a little wrong, and it puts her off kilter when she reaches out and the old girl doesn't reach back. It's like a piece of her mind is hollow,
and it used to be filled with the universe.
The Doctor hadn't noticed how her connection to the TARDIS had grown after she'd looked into the ship's Heart. If he had, he would've known the TARDIS hadn't let her go. They'd both left pieces of themselves with each other; the TARDIS living inside Rose. Rose living inside the TARDIS.
Her husband tells her this as they look at brain scans and test results and DNA samples, everything he says he should've done the moment she woke up, her memories scattered and his body dying.
He would never have left her here to watch everyone wither while she stayed young.
("I don't age, I regenerate. But humans decay, you wither and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone that you—")
Rose did everything she could, but that guilt never faded from his eyes. She spent fifteen years trying to make sure he knew that she was happy, with him. And she knows that he did, but that he also knew what was coming, and how it would feel.
("You can spend the rest of your life with me. But I can't spend the rest of mine with you."
Yes, he could.
But she couldn't.)
They don't have children. They would have, had their forevers matched up.
They talk about it, before they realize that he's been aging and she hasn't. But they aren't ready, and decide to wait a few years.
But it doesn't happen, because less than twelve months later they start to notice that she still looks twenty-one but he's greying at the temples.
They talk about it again, once she's spent six years trying to stop him from thinking about what will happen to her once everyone else is gone, when she's the only one left. He's been trying to make a dimension canon that won't rip the universe open; it hasn't been going well. She's been trying to drag him away from the project, from the very idea of it.
He brings it up because he's been wondering if they are just not-human enough to have a child that wouldn't have such a short, human lifespan. He doesn't want her to be alone, and they'd wanted children, before.
But there's no way to know, and if he's wrong then their child would be another person for her to watch fall away. She knows she couldn't do it—watch her baby die.
If he's right, they'd be condemning an innocent baby to a really long life in a world where everyone else has such a short one. They don't even know how long Rose will live. It could be forever;
it might not.
("I can see everything; all that is, all that was, all that ever could be.")
It's been so long that her original universe won't even have a place for her. She knows this, and she doesn't want to go back. She doesn't. (Of course she does.)
It's just—she's so alone.
Everyone is gone and they've been for a while, long enough that their headstones don't look new anymore and there's no one else still alive to visit them anyway. Just her.
("They're all gone. I'm the only survivor. I'm left travelling on my own because there's no one else."
"There's me.")
And she's tired; she knows now, how it feels. How he felt, always, for so long, carrying around the weight of everyone he loved turning to dust and gravestones while he stayed the same, never growing old beside them.
How cruel is it that this time, this version of him, the only one that got to try, still didn't get to. Instead, he was slammed into a life opposite the one he'd had before, where instead of watching the people he loved die, he would be the one to go.
He'd been given the chance to live the one life he never thought he could have, couldn't have, after centuries of seeing the stars. He'd wanted everything the slow path could offer—a marriage, children; family that would have the same forever he did. A mortgage and a house. A proper job. Stability, safety.
(With her.) A new kind of adventure.
And he'd been so excited for it.
("I've only got one life, Rose Tyler. I could spend it with you, if you want.")
He was hit by a car in the middle of the morning.
The driver got forty hours of community service for drinking under the influence, and Rose buried her husband not even fifteen years after promising him forever.
The grief was paralyzing, so all-consuming and loud that she got lost inside herself, mourning both the life with him that she had wanted so desperately, and the chance he thought he'd been given when they'd stood on that stupid fucking beach in fucking Norway and he told her he loved her for the first time. She mourns him, and she mourns for him.
("And how was that sentence going to end?"
"Does it need saying?")
It wasn't fair. She says so over and over and over;
She sits in a black dress after they lower him into the dirt and she whispers it's not fair it's not fair it's not fair until she's dry heaving over one of the toilets in the bathroom at the funeral home.
Her mother cradles her against her chest like she's still a child, and maybe she is, shaking and gasping like she can't breathe because she can't and she just cries it's not fair it's not fair it's not fair—"I know, sweetheart. I know. God, I know."
She sits before his grave, and grass has grown over the dirt. She scatters half a dozen seed packets of Forget-me-nots around his brand new headstone, whispering I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
I wanted to give you forever.
She wraps the unfairness of it all around her like a blanket and curls it close, like forgetting even one moment would be a betrayal of his memory. He wouldn't want her to feel this way, but he's dead.
("Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It's not the time that matters, it's the person."
Bullshit; they deserved more time. He deserved more time.)
The flowers she'd sowed sprout in the summer, coming to life over the grave of a dead man—a box of ashes and a cluster of please don't forget me flowers that spread out to the graves around his, all with weathered stones, old enough that nobody's around to visit anymore. Nobody remembers them, so she covers them in Forget-me-nots and watches as they grow and grow every year. God knows she has the time.
When she buries her parents, they go into the ground right near him, and she buries the fresh dirt under a blanket of blue and purple wildflowers, sitting in front of their newly-carved stones and whispering even though nobody is listening
it's not fair it's not fair it's not fair.
It's been a really long time. She's long outstayed her welcome in this city, this universe, but there's nowhere else to go. She's dead in her original universe and there's nothing left for her in this one but the graves she visits on Sunday evenings.
("Have a good life. Do that for me, Rose. Have a fantastic life."
She tried. God, she tried.)
She's been drifting, wandering, moving through London like a ghost for years she's lost count of.
This universe was never supposed to be hers. There's nothing for her here.
But there's no way home, and there's no home left there anyway. She's stuck here, dragging herself around in a universe where she'll never be anything more than a guest, who wasn't invited to stay for as long as she has.
She wonders if this is how life will always be—stumbling from place to place looking for a home but always feeling like a stranger passing through. A visitor in her own city, her own house.
It takes her a long time to realize that she's spent her whole life finding home in people, not places. And all those people are dead.
(Turns out London was only ever circumstance.)
Letting herself close to new ones feels impossible, knowing how quickly they will disappear; wither and fade. She wonders how the Doctor was able to for nine hundred years. Presumably, he still is.
(She hopes he is. He should never be alone.
"There's a lot of things you need, to get across this universe. You know the thing you need most of all? You need a hand, to hold.")
Sometimes all the time she wonders if she would be welcome, if she found a way back. She wonders if going back would be worse than staying.
If she stays, she'll never have to know what he would do if she came back, not the same girl he'd left behind. (She's not angry; it's just a fact. He left her here. He should've asked, but he didn't, and it took her a long time to understand why.
She wishes it had worked out the way he'd imagined.
That would've been nice.)
Maybe she would go back and find him arms open, happy to see her. Maybe she wouldn't. Maybe he's forgotten all about the nineteen-year-old girl whose hand he grabbed and whispered Run! and never stopped until the universes ripped them apart.
("They keep trying to split us up, but they never ever will.")
(She's not really that girl anymore, anyway.)
Maybe he wouldn't want her to travel with him anymore. Maybe she's changed too much and he wouldn't like who she's become. Maybe he's got people with him who wouldn't like her, and maybe the Tardis is full and there's just no room for one more.
(Somehow, she knows that even if the Doctor didn't want her there, the Tardis would. After all, they have shared a heart, left pieces of themselves with each other to hold safe. They can hear each other, all the time. Not anymore.
"I looked into the Tardis, and the Tardis looked into me.")
Even though she's sure he doesn't need her anymore, not like he once did ("He needs you, that's very me"), she needs him. Or maybe she doesn't, but she's so tired of being alone and she doesn't think she's strong enough to make friends like he does but have to watch them die.
He always leaves before that part.
They'd all go home eventually, make lives that he wasn't a part of so that in his head, they could live forever. And if he wanted, he could go back and see them. Quick visit. (He wouldn't, though.)
Rose is stuck living linear. If someone dies, they are gone to her forever. She would have no spaceship to fly away in before it could happen. She would have to stay and watch and bury them.
She doesn't think she can do it again; doesn't want to do it: love new people and watch them fall. Live forever, trapped and alone.
("Stuck with you, that's not so bad.")
She doesn't want any of it.
She just wanted to grow old with her husband.
There's room on his headstone for another name.
The plot next to him is empty; waiting for a body that will never be buried with his.
("I made my choice a long time ago, and I'm never going to leave you.")
She wonders if she'll ever get a grave, if she'll ever die. If she'll be around until the end of time—if the universe ever ends. (It has to, right?)
She thinks she'd do anything to not be.
He tells her he loves her for the first time on a cold beach in Norway, when the universe isn't in danger anymore but still feels like it's crashing down around her.
(For a moment, when she kisses him, the world starts putting itself back together, and she swears she can feel it happening.)
It's like a dam breaking. He says it once, a whisper in her ear half-drowned by the ocean wind, and then he never stops. Suddenly, he's always saying it.
I love you, with every hello and goodbye. He grins at her when she says something he finds particularly interesting (seemingly, all the time) like he'd always done before, but now when she stops to take a breath or wait for a reply, he'll say I love you like he's marveled by her.
He traces it over and over again in English letters on the back of her hands or whatever part of her is closest. Sometimes he'll draw it in what she assumes is Circular Gallifreyan. (Later, he will teach her the language and she will practice by writing the words up and down his arms;
I love you I love you I love you.)
Rose wonders if any of her skin would be left clear if all those lines and dots and curves saying I love you I love you I love you were to show up in color.
At first, she worries he's trying to make up for everything that's happened or that he's saying it so often just because he thinks she needs to hear it, or to convince her that he is the Doctor.
It takes three weeks for her to realize that he's saying it now because he can. Because he wants to. Because for a long time, he didn't.
He tells her as much on the roof of her apartment building in the middle of a night clear enough to see the stars. He's lying stiller than she's ever seen him, like his entire soul is quiet and resting. It's beautiful.
She counts stars in her head, because they're all back now, and she can feel him watching her. It feels familiar, like they've done this before. (They have. Floating through space, sitting in the doorway of the Tardis with hot tea and fuzzy blankets, looking at the stars. She'd make up names and constellations because she didn't know all the real ones like he did, and he'd smile at her like she was more interesting than the galaxies in front of them.
Just like he is now.)
"I love you," he tells her, and she lets her head fall to the side, meeting his eyes that are sparkly under the one am sky. He's beautiful.
She was told he'd be angry, born in battle, wanting revenge. (She wonders sometimes if the other Doctor had really believed he would be, or if it was something he'd said because it would be a reason for this Doctor to need her that he didn't share. A reason for her to be here instead of there.)
He's soft. He's not bitter and cold. He's gentle and warm and he's the Doctor. Just as she remembers.
Most of the time, she looks at him and sees the man she remembers spending hours with in the library in the Tardis between adventures, reading or playing board games or talking or just existing together. Curled close on one small couch even though there were three.
This man is the Doctor, the side of him that showed in the quiet moments when they were safe.
"I love you," she tells him, and he smiles so softly at her but she can still see a clinging flicker of quiet insecurity in his eyes, of the fear he's been carrying around that he won't be enough for her. That she'll look at him and not see the Doctor, not quite. Not enough.
She wishes she knew exactly what to say, what to do, to make that go away, to make him understand that he is enough. He is enough for her and he is enough for himself. He is enough.
(Rose tried talking about it like a regeneration once, and the grateful expression that washed over his face and the tension that dropped off his shoulders was so clear that it broke her heart.
He'd curled her close and dropped his head against her shoulder and said thank you in the softest, most vulnerable voice she'd ever heard, and she thought that he'd understood what she was trying to tell him, that it's okay if he's not exactly the same as before, because he's still him where it counts.
"Same software, different case.")
And she thinks that now when she says I love you, he mostly believes she's talking to him, and not a man a universe away.
"I haven't said it enough."
His voice is so quiet and sad and something that feels like anger shoots up her spine and she jolts up onto her elbows to look down at him so sharply that she feels the skin scrape. She doesn't know where the anger is aimed.
Maybe at herself.
Suddenly she feels incredibly heavy. The feeling floods from her skull down through her chest, dropping a rock into her ribcage and pouring cement over her bones.
She lets him ease her back down and brush his thumb over her elbow, where the skin didn't split but little crumbles of stone are clinging to her in the shallow indents they've made. They fall away under his touch, and he runs his fingers down to her hand and wraps it up in both of his, resting over his stomach.
"You say it all the time," she tells him.
("And I suppose, if it's my one last chance to say it, Rose Tyler—")
"I've known you for years."
Oh. Rose feels her heart crack. For a moment there's just quiet around them, as though the air is still and nothing outside of what's right here in front of them is happening. Like the rest of the world is frozen while they lie in silence on a rooftop in London in a universe neither of them belong to, but will make a home in anyway.
She wonders what she's supposed to say, or if there's anything she can say to make this better. To make him understand. She settles for: "Please don't hurt," in a whisper so small that she worries it'll have faded into the air before it can reach him.
He drops his head to the side to look at her, and his eyes are wet; she's never truly seen him cry before. With a shaking hand she reaches for him, pushing herself closer to his side and brushing her thumb under his eye. A tear falls, sliding down her nail and landing in the dip between her index finger and her thumb.
The way she curls her hand to cup his cheek like she's holding something precious seems to pull him even closer, until he drops his forehead against her bicep and takes a shuddering breath.
"Can I tell you about times I wanted to? Almost did?" He asks, voice just as low as hers. "There are so many."
She wants to tell him that she doesn't need that, doesn't need a timeline of his love before she can believe him when he tells her he does. But she tilts her head down to look at him, and she thinks that maybe he needs to say it. Maybe he's spent nine hundred years not saying things and he's tired of it, now.
(For a brief moment, a warm feeling spreads through her chest at the thought that she is able to make him feel safe enough to open up, followed by a cold splinter of devastating sorrow that he hasn't always had that, for every second he's been alive.)
"Of course," she tells him. "But you don't have to, okay? I don't need that."
"I know," he says. He pauses though, and for a long while, he doesn't say anything. But when she starts to think he's changed his mind, he starts playing with her hand in his, drawing shapes on the back and gently twisting her ring in slow circles around her thumb and then starting to write letters from the inside of her wrist all the way down to the tips of her fingers; I love you I love you I love you, and he tells her all the times he said something else, instead.
("I could save the world but lose you."
"You made me better."
"I bet you're gonna have a really great year."
"If you talk to Rose, just tell her . . . tell her I . . . oh, she knows."
"I'm burning up a sun just to say goodbye."
"Oh, I thought . . . you might not want me anymore." "Oh, I'd love you to come."
"If I believe in one thing, just one thing, I believe in her.")
"I'm missing a heart," he says, and she'd thought that being Earth-bound would be the hardest part for him, but it's not. "I can hear the difference. Sometimes it feels really loud."
"You've still got two," she tells him, eyes locked on the sky. (Counting stars has become a bad habit.)
She can feel him looking at her, his gaze somehow softer in the dark. His hair is messy and he's in his pajamas just like her. They're both wrapped up in blankets because midnight in October is cold.
She reaches a hundred stars, but knows she's counted a few of them twice. She's distracted by the circular Gallifreyan that he's been tracing up and down her forearm—her name, over and over and over. Rose Rose Rose.
(The way the Doctor says her name is unparalleled. Nobody else will ever be able to say it like he does, with so much affection and warmth and like she's so precious to him. It makes her feel incomparably special, always has.)
"No, I'm human now; one heart." Even at a whisper, he manages to sound so completely confused, like he's wondering if she's actually forgotten. Of course she hasn't.
She stops counting stars, but she doesn't turn away from them. Blindly, she reaches for him, extracting her hand from his and taking it, unfolding his fingers and pressing his flat palm over his heart; it's right where a human's is meant to be.
With her other hand she pulls his close, resting it over her own heart. She can feel the warmth of his skin even through her shirt.
For a moment, she holds his hands over their heartbeats as they lie, side by side, under the waxing moon with starlight on their skin, pressed shoulder to shoulder with her eyes on the sky and his fixated on her.
"See?" She whispers, quiet and soft, and she can almost feel the echo of their hearts pulsing up through his hands into hers. "Two hearts."
For the first time in his life, having one heart in his chest feels just fine. Good, even.
(She's still looking up at the stars, and he's spent the last few months wishing he could take her up there again. But maybe it'll be okay that he can't.
"Traveling with you, I love it."
She tells him she's happy here, with him, on Earth, and he believes her.)
"I love you," he says.
Torchwood is a big fan of her screwed up biology. It seems to completely fascinate them, and they desperately want to stick her under a microscope and poke around. But she's not a science project, and she refuses to become one.
So instead, they throw her into more field missions. With seeming immortality, they aren't as concerned for her safety. This enrages the Doctor, and it will never stop doing so.
Two centuries later, they're still doing it but he's not here to be upset on her behalf. No one is. It's just her, not caring anymore.
If she dies, that's okay. She wouldn't mind.
She works seven days a week by choice, goes on every mission and finds her way onto every team for every emergency, every alien invasion or sighting or anything. Then, she goes back to the lab and tinkers around with projects that Torchwood doesn't care about until she can barely move her limbs and her eyes are so heavy she can't hold them open.
Sometimes, she considers going back to school and finishing that PhD, because she could if she wanted. It wouldn't be hard; she's built impossible things and worked with technology a million years and galaxies beyond the information in university textbooks.
She never does.
She wasn't planning to use it.
Really, she wasn't.
After two centuries, Rose didn't even think it would work. And she wasn't going to find out.
Except, she'd held onto it for over two hundred years, and it was still sitting at the bottom of a box in her current living room, devoid of decoration and life. (She's lived here for three years, and doesn't even have a couch.)
The yellow of the button is faded. It's scratched up and dented from the corner of a picture frame that's spent decades pressing into it.
It doesn't have any power, and the tech is so old she's half-forgotten how it works. If she pressed the button, she knows that nothing would happen.
But she digs it out and sits on the floor of her living room—empty save for the pile of boxes in the corner—and pries it open. She blows dust out of the circuitry and fiddles around with all the pieces until she's sure they're all exactly where they're supposed to be. She replaces a few wires and scrapes rust off several of the metal components.
It probably won't work.
Still, she walks like a zombie, all quiet limbs and listless eyes, to her room. She listens to the sprinkling rain outside her open window as she peels everything off her body and drags over her head the pink sundress she was wearing when he asked her to marry him.
("Think what you look like to them, all pink and yellow.")
She stares at herself in the mirror, bleach-blonde hair pulled into a ponytail at the base of her skull, hairs falling out in the front and touching the tops of her collarbones. A silver chain around her neck, carrying her Tardis key and wedding rings.
She drags out the hairband and doesn't flinch when it pulls a little too hard. There's a small kink all the way around where the ponytail was tied back; she walks away without trying to brush it smooth.
("Blimey, you look beautiful. Considering."
"Considering what?"
"That you're human."
"I think that's a compliment?")
She hasn't decided what she's going to do, but she holds the dimension cannon in both of her hands as she steps out onto the sidewalk, under a blanket of grey sky that's more dripping than raining. Still, she's soaked to the bone by the time she reaches the cemetery on the outskirts of the city, her bare arms covered in gooseflesh and cold to the touch, though she doesn't feel it.
The letters on his grave are chipped and weathered, and so are her parents'.
She stands in front of them, clutching the button tight enough that she'd worry about cracking the casing if she were paying attention.
Gracelessly, she falls into the earth, coming to rest cross-legged in the grass, early summer Forget-me-nots tickling her calves, a feather-light touch that reminds her of I love you I love you I love you traced so gently onto her skin over and over and over until she was drenched in the words.
She hasn't cried in a century, but now, alone in a graveyard with a choice to make, Rose Tyler pulls her knees to her chest and sobs. The world spins and she can feel it—
("We're falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny, little world. And if we let go. . . That's who I am.")
—as she wraps her arms around her head and curls up as small as she can and cries like she did when he died two-hundred-and-fifteen years ago and she splintered into a million pieces on the cracked tile floor of the bathroom in the funeral home.
Longing slams into her chest and drags the air out of her lungs and suddenly all she wants in the world is her mother; a warm hug in soft arms, a woman who always smelled like hot tea and peppermint hand lotion.
She cries so hard it hurts. Her stomach clenches and her eyes burn; she digs crescents into her bare legs until the top layer of skin is clawed off and she bleeds and turns red, pinpricks of blood creeping out and washing away in the rain.
She leans close to his stone, pressing her hand flat over the faded Gallifreyan chiseled in the margins, and lets the worn rock cut into her palm.
I love you I love you I love you, she thinks. Forgive me.
(He'd say there is nothing to forgive.
He'd asked her to go back, once he was gone. But she couldn't, hadn't, wouldn't. Maybe she will now.
"Am I ever going to see you again?"
"You can't.")
Her hands are shaking; she looks at the dimension canon in her hands and wonders what would happen if she pressed it.
Possibly, nothing.
The walls of the universe are closed. The machine only ever worked because the walls were falling.
Maybe she could get through one, if there's a weak point. But not both. The canon doesn't have that kind of power. Nothing does, not really.
She'd get lost in the void. She'd dissolve into nothing, not even atoms. Just gone. (An easy escape from immortality.)
She traces the letters on his headstone with her thumb like he used to trace words on her skin. If she goes, there will be no one left to love him. No one left to visit his grave or her mother's or her father's, or her brother's. The entire universe will have forgotten them.
The flowers around them will keep growing, year after year, coming back, but nobody will see them. Nobody will sit with them and remember. ("Who's gonna hold his hand now?")
She stares down at the button, her thumbs resting over the center that used to be shiny, bright yellow. She doesn't know what outcome she's hoping for.
She presses the button.
("And do you know what? I wouldn't have missed it for the world.")