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"Closure"
Chapter 1: Remembrance
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Rose is sitting in a pub, drinking something blue out of an oddly thick glass. She knows she's somewhere in the Rigel system, maybe Rigella itself, but she figures it doesn't much matter just now. She's thinking, as she always thinks when she's had a few pints, about the past. About her past. It's been near eight years since she left the Doctor.
Nine years since her Doctor left her.
"Regeneration. That's a kicker," she thinks bitterly, as she's thought so many times before, "bastard was too alien to die like a normal person and give me some peace." She slouches against the bar and shuts her eyes.
She'd stayed with him for a whole year after she'd lost him. She'd kept searching this new man, hoping for traces of her Doctor. She would watch him out the corner of her eye as he worked on the TARDIS, watching the twist of his head or his way of tossing that stupid sonic screwdriver, desperate for a movement that would prove to her that her Doctor was alive somehow in this new incarnation. She would grab his hand as they ran, towards safety or towards adventure, but it was never the same. It didn't fit. This hand was too soft, too small. The man was The Doctor, the last of the Time Lords, but he wasn't the man she'd known. For twelve months she'd tried, holding onto a ghost, before she'd finally jumped ship to try starting her life over. Her Doctor was dead, but she couldn't bury him, and trying to recreate their life together had been killing her.
"Shove off, mate," she growls as an enormous lizard with purple skin tries to jostle her for a seat near the bar. Funny how quickly you get used to things like that. Even alien becomes mundane, eventually.
No, it hadn't been a complete waste, that year with the new Doctor. She'd learned loads about Travelling. Learned about time, and about the Universe, and how to keep herself out of trouble during a minor interplanetary war as well as she could on the London streets. She'd seen magnificent things, and fought for her life, and been to planets that'd been dead for thousands of years before she was born, and met a whole rainbow of people. She'd actually learned to call them 'people'. Her Doctor had always ribbed her about that.
When she'd finally decided to leave, once and for all, the Doctor had offered to take her home. It had been tempting, she had to admit. It would've been so good to see her mum again. To just let herself fall back into the rhythm of a normal, ordinary life on Earth. But a woman who's spent a third of her life exploring the universe has a hard time fitting in on a backward ape planet. Even if it's her backward ape planet. So she'd told him to leave her wherever it suited. He'd shrugged and left her at their next stop, with a group of humanoid colonists who were going to try to colonize one of the sentient planets of Alpha-Quadiscant 3.
She shifts in her seat as one of the purple lizard's three tails begins to get a little too chummy with her leg. Bloody Reptilicants can never keep their body parts to themselves.
The new Doctor been fond of her, of course. She was a quick learner, and an extra pair of hands was always a help in the TARDIS. But she knew he wasn't sad to see her go. She'd looked into his eyes as they'd said goodbye. They were sweet brown eyes, but there was no fire in them. That had made it easier.
And so for eight years she's been drifting, helping out here and there, catching rides from place to place. She knows by now which species to avoid, and which are safe to talk to in a pub, and which will be quite friendly as long as you remember to always speak with your voice pitched twice as high as usual. She gets by, she knows, and she always will. She's like her Doctor that way, she's intelligent, and she's practical, and she can survive.
But she still misses him. She can't help it. Almost every day she thinks of him, when some little thing reminds her. She misses his deep-set gray eyes, the way they used to burn straight through her when he looked at her the way he did, and the way she could always tell what he was thinking. And she misses the manic grin that used to flash across his face in the most unlikely of situations, as they were facing certain death at the hands of the Inquisition, or having a first-class row in the control room of the TARDIS. Their rows had never amounted to anything, though. The angrier they'd gotten, the more helplessly they'd ended up laughing about it when their anger was spent. She misses the smell of his old leather jacket. He'd worn it everywhere, no matter what the local fashion, no matter whether she was wearing her old jeans, or a color-changing kimono with a headdress that looked like it was made of paper airplanes. And no one had ever questioned him about it. Somehow his force of personality had made everything alright. He could've managed to make anyone comfortable with him, when he'd been feeling friendly. And he usually had been.
"I thought i told you to watch it!" Rose says angrily as she feels something brush her thigh.
"Sorry, but it's a bit crowded!"
The voice is so comfortable, so familiar, that it barely registers. Then slowly she turns around to see a pair of gray eyes, and an old leather jacket, and suddenly the alcohol hits her, hard, and the gray and the leather blur as she slides to the floor.
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