Egyptian Tahtib: … Et Adieu
"STOP!" Rose's voice was ripped out of her chest involuntarily, harsh and cracked. She turned stiffly, jerkily, to stare at the couple, who had both turned to stare back at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
Both of them were young, with flaming red hair, and obviously British – Scots, even, Rose realized as their slight lilts penetrated the edges of her mind, the part that wasn't the blazing, roaring center.
Somehow, she forced herself to take a breath, to turn, to walk towards them on leaden feet. "Take me to the TARDIS," she ordered them hoarsely. "I need to see the Doctor."
"You... know the Doctor?" asked the woman, but Rose just turned and gave her a flat, silent stare, hard as durantium, cold as the depths of space. As cold as her suddenly-frozen heart.
The two of them glanced at each other uneasily. "OK," replied the man, and he gestured forward. He led Rose a few blocks away, his companion following worriedly behind, and then they turned a corner, and the humans faded completely out of Rose's consciousness.
There, tucked into the bend of an alley, was the one sight she had truly believed she would never see again in her lifetime: the TARDIS. She halted involuntarily, stumbling a bit, momentarily blinded by tears, then she shook her head hard and resolutely marched forward, one hand reaching up unconsciously to pull the scarf off her head. (Behind her, the couple, who had stopped at the corner to see what she'd do, glanced at each other again and shrugged, then followed. She'd seen the TARDIS through its perception filter; obviously she wasn't a stranger to it.)
Reaching those achingly-familiar blue doors, Rose simply reached out a hand and pushed. The doors were always locked, and she no longer had a key. But it opened to her touch, anyway. She was remembered.
She stepped through – and suddenly halted yet again, her mouth falling open in shock. The TARDIS control room had changed, drastically. The insides were completely different, all psychedelic orange and peach and brown, with stairs plunging up and down between three different levels. Disoriented at first, then her eyes drifted up, and fastened on the one thing that hadn't changed: the glowing blue-green column of the time rotor, above a redesigned, organic-looking circular console.
"Did you find it?" came a strange voice from the far side of the console, then someone loped around and peered over the railing at her. Not a face she'd ever seen before, but there was not a flicker of doubt in her mind about his identity.
The Doctor.
But when was he? Would he know her? Or was this a Doctor before her time?
He stopped dead, just as she had, not breathing, staring wildly at her face, and his square jaw almost hit the railing. Then, after half a lifetime, he whispered, the sound barely reaching her ears. "Rose..."
So, her brain managed to supply, and then it abruptly broke from its paralysis completely. This is a later version. Good. (Although she couldn't have articulated then what was so "good" about it.)
She said not a word, but simply stared back up at the face which had apparently supplanted "her" Doctor's. She watched him draw in a deep, gulping breath, then turn and awkwardly climb down the stairs, until he stood at last before her. She vaguely registered the other two – his current companions, no doubt – stepping in behind her and closing the door, then edging around to one side of the room to watch, and then dismissed them again from her mind.
This Doctor was shorter than "hers" by a couple of inches, with what to her jaundiced perception seemed like beady, shifty little eyes, lank brown hair falling over one side of a broad forehead, a huge lantern jaw, and a jutting, beaky nose. And, jarringly, a loud, polka-dotted bow tie. She didn't bother with the rest of his clothes after that.
He opened his mouth. "Rose... um..."
She held up a hand to stop him, closing her eyes and turning her head away. Then she took a deep breath. "I'm sorry," she began. Her hand dropped a little, and she gazed vaguely over his shoulder so as not to look straight at him, shuffling a step closer. "I know this is... ridiculously, stupidly clichéd..."
And then she hauled off and slapped him as hard as she could, rocking him sideways. His jaw dropped open, and he held a hand to it, very slowly coming upright again to stare at her, wounded and surprised. Well, maybe not surprised.
"Hey!" burst out of the female companion, outraged.
The Doctor shot a hand up to stop her without glancing her way. "Amy..." was all he said. (Rory, for of course it was he, reached out to grab Amy's arm, and she stepped back again beside her husband, watching their Doctor – Eleven – take care of his own business.)
Rose's arms had crossed across her chest of their own volition. "You dumped me," she hissed. "Like a stray dog." Reaching back to that wretched day on the beach, two aching, impossibly long years before, she ripped the scars off her heart and showed him the roiling poison hidden underneath. "And you didn't even stop to make sure you had the right parallel," she added bitterly.
"What?" he asked, distracted, perplexed.
"You left us in the wrong world, Doctor!" Rose damn near screamed. "It wasn't Beta – Pete's World. And we played HELL getting back there!"
"But you did make it back?" the Doctor latched on to her wording, flailing desperately for a lifesaver.
"No thanks to you!" she snarled.
He nodded jerkily, accepting the rebuke. "And," he began tentatively, "what are you doing here, then?"
Rose's jaw jutted out, capturing his attention like it always had, her icy eyes drilling through his soul. "Taking care of business. And we don't need your help," she rasped out through clenched teeth.
The Doctor raised his head, trying for a jaunty air. "Good!" he chirped. "We'll just... go..." His voice trailed off at her furious expression, and he shut his mouth with a pop. No go.
She stared hard at him for a long, silent moment, not acknowledging the byplay, then her mouth parted, and one single, anguished word slipped out. "Why?"
He didn't bother pretending to misunderstand. Instead, he looked straight back, and answered from his hearts. "Because I wanted you to be happy. And you could be, with him. But not with me."
She started to shake her head, but he cut her off this time. "Rose, look at me. Yeah, you'd have been happy at first, but this face? This man? I changed, so much. And it didn't happen very long after that, either. But he..." The Doctor paused a moment, swallowed, then continued quietly, using his own words from so long ago. "He can spend the rest of his life with you, and you can spend the rest of yours with him. And he is me – the me you fell in love with, the me that fell in love with you. Your Doctor. The one you can keep, forever."
She had to look away at that, his only admission – ever – that he had fallen in love with her. Once upon a time. Tears sprang to her eyes again, and she blinked them back, hard, then her gaze returned to his face, her voice ragged.
"Didn't you ever stop to think that maybe I would have liked to have been given the choice? No," she rode over him, "I didn't choose. Don't give me that. YOU chose. You always choose."
"NO!" his turn to cut in, stung. "That is not true. I never dragged you in here, or anybody else. It was ALWAYS your choice to come along, and keep coming along. Yes, I made the last choice, this time, but you can't say I made all of them."
Her eyes flickered at the "this time", unwanted reminder that she was only one in a long line of companions. How many of their stories had he ended, as he'd ended Sarah Jane's? She didn't want to know.
She shook her head again. "Don't you understand, Doctor?" Her voice was small, now, drenched in pain and memory. "It wasn't just you. It was this life. It was this ship. This wonderful, crazy, fantastic time ship..." Her eyes had wandered longingly upwards towards the time rotor, and as they caught the glow emanating from above, her voice drifted off, her head stopped moving, and her pupils dilated wide.
And started glowing in response, a tiny golden spark from deep within.
"Oh, no, no, no, no, what are you doing?" the Doctor asked, swiftly becoming frantic. He glanced wildly back and forth between Rose and the rotor, sending the same question to the sentient time ship along their psychic link. *What are you DOING?* There was only silence in reply.
Deep, deep inside Rose's brain, a single, long-silent neuron fired, and a ghost of a shadow of a whisper of a memory slipped across her mind, trailing the faintest echo of Knowing... and Being... and Power... Somewhere far across vast, empty time and space, a lone wolf howled. Then slowly, so slowly, it faded, as the TARDIS gently disengaged. The answering glow in Rose's eyes dimmed and went out, and the Doctor sagged, still gazing at her fearfully, only partially relieved.
"Rose?" he whispered tentatively, not daring to touch her – for his own sake if not for hers.
Her unseeing eyes drifted down again, as she processed the meaning of what the TARDIS had put into her mind. Tangled feelings, scattered words, tattered fragments of ideas, hers and his and the ship's, a whirling mass that gradually slowed and cleared, most of it draining away between her now-human-again neurons and seeping out to be lost in the outer darkness. But some of it remained, crystallizing slowly into something she could hold and understand.
"I was right," she whispered. At last she refocused her eyes on his face, seeing it again for the first time, piercing through to his soul. "We're all just pets to you. – Oh," she shook off his automatic protest, which died unspoken on his lips, "Beloved pets, of course. Companions. But never equals. Not even Donna." She stopped, and the shadow of painful realization dawned anew. "I could never have been your wife. Because she is. Always has been. Always will be." The upwards flicker of her eyes made it plain who "she" was: the sentient TARDIS.
The Doctor stood still, silent. Neither confirming nor denying.
"But you can be his wife," he said simply.
Rose's eyes flew closed in pain, flinching back from the reality. But then, she slowly nodded, acknowledging the truth of it.
"Are you happy?" he asked. She didn't answer. "Married?" he probed again. This time, she gave a tiny, rueful little smile.
"Almost."
"Then..." The Doctor's mouth shut again, not saying the rest of the sentence.
And then, thinking of Jared, and all he had come to mean to her and always had, it hit her. She gasped, her eyes flying open wide, and they darted again up to the time rotor, and she took a step forward, speaking desperately, directly to the glowing column, to the TARDIS.
"It was you. You're the reason he can speak French again – and Arabic. The translator circuit. You're in his head again, aren't you?" She shook her head wildly, visions of how Jared's world, his fragile, painfully half-rebuilt psyche would come crashing down if he realized it. She began begging, pleading with the ship. "Please. Please. Give it back to him. Give him languages again – just the Earth ones, the ones he needs now. But don't let him feel you, or know it's you. Please..." She paused, then whispered again, voice breaking, "He was part of you once."
The four people held their breath for a long, aching, moment, and then the time rotor flashed brighter, just once, and a soft chime pealed through the control room. She had agreed, and done as requested.
Rose's eyes sank closed once again, grateful tears squeezing out from under her lids, and her fist flew up to her lips, keeping sobs trapped behind them. A moment later she had herself under control, and she took her fist away just far enough to whisper brokenly, "Thank you."
She took a few deep breaths, then opened her eyes again and looked at the Doctor one last time. He didn't speak a word; he didn't have to. She nodded anyway. She'd just proven whose wife she was.
Then, her eyes narrowed again. "I'll still never forgive you."
"Good," he replied, as level and honest as she.
One long, long last look, then... "Goodbye, Doctor," she said simply.
Rose Tyler turned and walked out the TARDIS door for the last time ever, steadily, under her own power. She kept going straight, to the end of the alley and on out to the street. A moment later, she heard the time ship whooshing out of existence behind her. But she never hesitated, she never glanced back.
Her head was high. And her eyes were dry.