Thanks for the reviews for the chapters so far... I do love getting them lol!
"You gave me strength to stand alone again, to face the world out on my own again."
Rose looked down into the cot. There she was, the last Time Lord…well, Lady really, Rose supposed. She wasn't sure if that was the right title. She wasn't even sure exactly how it had all happened. But it had. In this cot in this inconsequential flat lay the child of the Last Time Lord. Rose had realised the enormity of the situation almost as soon as she'd found out she was pregnant, and it had only multiplied since she'd had the baby.
Finding a name had been difficult. Rose had wanted something that would embody everything about the baby's importance, something that would mark her out as different. It had at least been something positive she could concentrate on whilst she sat around, waiting for the baby to come, and nursed a broken heart. She found keeping busy was the best way to avoid having to think about him. She'd spent hours on the internet at the local library, investigating. The librarian had soon come to recognise her, the young pregnant girl who always came alone and always looked sad. Even when she smiled as she handed over her library card to register to use the system, it didn't reach her eyes. Mrs. Hewson remembered how she'd felt when she was pregnant with her first child, now a bold little boy of eight. So lost and alone; she'd never intended to have children so young. Something in Rose struck a chord with her, and she felt compelled to join in the search.
Rose searched every imaginable name. The midwife had confirmed at her twenty-two week scan that she was expecting a girl, and Rose had latched onto that. She went through the usual few. Jacqueline… but she couldn't imagine two Jackies in the same house. Petra after her dad… but that brought up too many memories. She thought about what the baby would represent. Light… Lucy. She just couldn't find a name that would work. And all she could keep wondering day after day was, what would he want her to be called? What would he think of this name, or that name? She wanted to kick herself for even considering his thoughts in the matter.
Mrs. Hewson preferred books to the internet. She'd exhausted all the popular books on the shelves and was going through more unusual ones, reading them out sometimes to amuse herself. The names some people gave their children! She found the name one day.
"How about Tala?" she suggested one afternoon as they both sat, looking through books.
Rose had looked up, her mind suddenly captivated by the sounds of the name. Tala. It rolled off the tongue. It sounded pretty, it sounded mystical and ethereal. It sounded like the name of a Time Lady.
"I love it," she said eventually, reaching for the book. The librarian held onto it though.
"Oh, no, sorry," she apologised. "It means wolf. Not exactly the kind of thing you'd like your little girl to be called is it!" She laughed, even as Rose shuddered. Wolf. Bad Wolf.
"It's perfect," Rose insisted, gathering her things together. Her emotions were all over the place at the moment; being pregnant was hard enough without being all alone too. She needed to get out of there as soon as possible and find a private place to think. And cry; she definitely needed to cry. She rattled off a string of thanks and apologies and excuses, before dashing out of the library. She moved as fast as a six-month pregnant woman could, trying to hold back the tears until she could bury her head in her pillow at home.
Her mum had reacted as Rose had predicted to the suggestion of the name. Rose had kept it from her until after the birth, knowing Jackie would hate it.
"Tala?" she looked at her daughter like she'd gone mad. "Tala Tyler? Rose, do you hate your daughter or something? You can't be serious!"
"I am," Rose said firmly, looking at the baby. "She's a Tala."
"And what on earth does a Tala look like?" Jackie continued ranting. "What's wrong with a normal name, Rose? A normal name like Chloe or Louise or something? This is something that he's suggested isn't it? God, he isn't content with ruining your life is he? He has to muscle in on this poor thing's happiness too! Really, Rose, Tala Tyler?"
Rose valiantly struggled to control her temper. "Mum, please. She's called Tala. And I don't want to talk about him again."
It had all happened so fast. He'd been acting like it was a normal day, that everything was normal.
"We'll just nip back to your mum's," he said one morning, as he fiddled with the controls on the TARDIS. "See how she's doing."
She'd thought it was odd at the time; he usually tried to avoid Jackie like the plague. But she hadn't argued. It had been a long time since they'd last seen her mum, and she couldn't wait to fill her in on all the things that had been happening. Well, not all the things…
Having thrown a few things into her rucksack, Rose hesitated by the TARDIS door.
"Aren't you coming?" she asked.
He'd glanced up from the controls and grinned. "Yeah, course I am. I'll follow you."
Rose had stepped outside the door into the warm May day, having to close her eyes as she looked into the sun. "It's a lovely day, Doctor," she'd remarked. She heard the door shut behind her. She whipped round. "Doctor?" That familiar noise began, and Rose felt her stomach churn anxiously. "Doctor? What's happening?" The blue telephone box began fading before her eyes. "No! Stop!" she yelled, dropping her bag and rushing towards it. She reached out to grasp the door handle just as it all disappeared from view. Her hand dropped through thin air.
He'd gone without her. She waited a few minutes. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe he'd come back for her. It wasn't the first time he'd made a mistake with the TARDIS after all. She teased him frequently.
"Thousands of years, you've had this thing thousands of years, and you still can't work it properly!" she'd exclaimed one day, as she sat and watched him try and work out quite how they'd ended up in San Francisco in 1903 ("Just in time for the earthquake!" he'd exclaimed cheerfully) instead of Saturn in 3091. It was fully possible that he'd made the same sort of mistake again.
Minutes passed. An hour passed. He hadn't come back. Rose wanted to believe he'd made a mistake, but with every second that ticked by, she felt her spirits dampen. He wasn't coming back. Reluctantly, she picked her bag up and trudged up to her mum's flat.
To say it had been hard to cope with being abandoned was an understatement. A vast understatement. Rose had spent days wandering around the flat, waiting for that tell-tale noise that would mean he'd come back and he would take her away with him again. She couldn't have imagined being without him now; she just didn't know what she'd do. He was so much a part of everything that made up her life now; he was her best friend, her soulmate, the man who had taught her everything she knew. He'd shown her other worlds and strange things; he'd taken her to meet her dad. He'd let her be the girl she'd always wanted to be; he'd made her feel like a success for the first time in her life. Without him, she just felt lost and so alone.
Her mum had hit the roof when Rose finally admitted that not only was she pregnant but that the Doctor had gone away without telling her where or when or even if he'd be back.
"He's done what?" Jackie screeched. Rose couldn't decide whether to join in or defend her Doctor. "He's left you? Just wandered off? Didn't I say he was trouble? Didn't I warn you? I'll kill him! I'll kill him if he ever so much as sets foot back in this flat! I made him promise not to lay a finger on you, what were you thinking, Rose?" The ranting and shouting had continued for nearly ten minutes, while Rose tried to think of other things. It had taken her three months to come to terms with all herself; three months where she'd sat by her bedroom window, her eyes trained on the spot where she'd last seen the square box that had carried away her life. She'd wandered helplessly from room to room, gazing out of each window, just hoping that he was back. That he'd walk back into her life and take her in his arms and forgive her for whatever she'd done wrong. Hold her and tell her everything would be all right. Because she really wasn't sure anymore.
Jackie had finally exhausted herself with a string of abuse aimed at the absent Doctor. She turned back to her only daughter, her pride and joy, the one thing she had in her life. Her Rose… "Oh sweetheart," she said, her voice dropping several decibels as she sat down next to her on the sagging sofa. She put an arm around her and brushed her hair back off of her face. "It'll be fine."
Rose felt her heart finally crack in two. It had taken so long; each day the crack had got bigger, she had felt it happening. Each day that went by when he was away, the fracture had got wider and longer. Now finally, having shared her secrets and her misery with someone else, the only person she had left in the world, she felt it all fall apart in front of her. She wasn't the strong Rose she'd become on her travels. She wasn't even the stubborn Rose who had left school in a temper and given her mum so much grief when she was younger. She was just Rose Tyler, nineteen, pregnant, single and terrified.
"I'm so scared, Mum," she said, burying her head in her mum's shoulder. Tears streamed down her face and sobs choked every word. "I'm so scared."
Rose had found herself becoming more and more withdrawn as the months passed. She'd tried going out to various places with her mum and found all the looks from people she'd once known, once been close to, all too much.
"They're not looking at you!" Jackie insisted. "You're imagining it. And if they are, it's only because you're pregnant, everyone looks at pregnant women, it's just life. At least you haven't had anyone put their hands all over you yet! The amount of people that did that when I was carrying you!"
Still, Rose couldn't be convinced to leave the flat apart from for essential hospital visits and the occasional shopping trip. Everywhere she went, she could feel people staring at her, judging her. There goes Rose Tyler, another teenage mum off the estate. I wonder which bloke is the father. Deep inside she was screaming indignantly, wanting to tell them that it wasn't like that. That the man she'd left with once and then come back with was the same man, that he wasn't a man at all, but a Time Lord, the last Time Lord. That Mickey had gone to stay somewhere else through his own choice, that she hadn't dumped him, had never stopped loving him really. Just that she'd started loving him in a different way. She wanted to say so much but she couldn't. She couldn't do anything, couldn't be anything without him. Without her Doctor.
She'd thought she could never be happy again. She felt like only half a person without him. Then she'd found someone that could help, someone that had suddenly made her feel important and strong again. She held her daughter in her arms, terrified of hurting her, but even more terrified to let her go. She was so tiny, so innocent and defenceless. She was crying out for her to protect her and look after her. Rose felt some confidence flow back into her veins. This little girl needed her. She'd do whatever it took to look after her. She knew in the second she looked into the dark chocolate eyes that Tala had inherited from her father, that she'd kill for this girl, would die several times over. The feelings she had came upon her so fiercely that they surprised her. She was all Tala had; she had to be strong.
Rose had felt ashamed to be pregnant. She knew she shouldn't have, but she did. Now, suddenly, she found herself proud. Proud to have such a beautiful daughter. Proud to have been honoured with such a precious gift, another person to bring up, another life entrusted to her. She'd never even had a pet, except some goldfish that a boyfriend of Jackie's had won at the fair for her. They'd died within days. Now she was responsible for a little person, someone who relied on her totally. She was scared, but she was determined to be everything to Tala.
Only sometimes did Rose find everything getting on top of her. On long nights when Tala wouldn't settle, and she'd paced the short length of her room continually, she found herself thinking what could have been, what should have been and what might have been. She found herself getting frustrated. Each wail from Tala felt like a criticism of her parenting skills. It felt like Tala was asking for something, something Rose couldn't give her.
"Tala, please," she said one night, at almost three in the morning. "Please, darling, just go to sleep. I'm tired, you must be tired. Just please, sleep." Tala carried on crying. Rose couldn't help herself anymore. She was so tired that the tears just started falling. "I'm sorry," she sniffed in a half-whisper. "I'm so sorry, Tala. I'm trying, I really am, but I know I'm not enough. I wanted so much better for you, sweetheart, I wanted everything to be different this time around. I didn't have a daddy either. And I so wanted you to have one. But you haven't. And I'm so sorry. So so sorry."
Lyrics for this chapter come from "You needed me" by Boyzone.