December 15, 2016

She crushed the Skaraax spike under the edge of her boot and threw herself to the side as the other arm's swing came her way. Deadly poison dripped from the long, red spikes protruding from the well-muscled upper limbs that reached for her.

"And I thought our chat had been going so well," she quipped, side-stepping a charge from the lumbering alien. "No need to lose your temper."

The Chief Commander of the Skaraax excursionary force on Earth spat obscenities at the blonde woman and she laughed humourlessly, raising a black pistol-like object towards him and pulling the trigger when he turned back her way. The electrodes fixed themselves to his chest. He dropped to the floor with a loud crack and convulsed for a moment. She pulled long, plastic ties from a pocket on the interior of her coat and secured his hands.

"Now, Commander, how about we try that again?"

Hours later, Rose Tyler sat in her small office at U.N.I.T. Cardiff, fuming. She was carefully dressing a laceration she'd sustained when the absolute idiot that Torchwood had sent had managed to offend the very proud Skaraaxean Commander's heritage which had launched him into a rage.

Pritchard, from Torchwood, had been taken from the room on a stretcher and neck brace. Rose, for her part, had sustained only a few cuts and bruises, only one of which required any care. Five years since she'd left Torchwood, she huffed to herself, and they still managed to drive her round the bend on a regular basis.

She hissed through clenched teeth as she pulled the laceration at her collarbone closed and applied butterfly strips to keep it that way. After covering it with gauze and tape, she cleaned up her supplies and pulled her jacket back on. Rose saw no need to disturb the branch office nurse to tend her. U.N.I.T. Cardiff had only three office employees, an outpost more than a proper satellite office, and the other two were out for the afternoon. Troops at the base outside the city would be practicing drills and Rose debated joining them but decided she'd dealt with enough today. Her head was throbbing, her muscles were screaming, and every time she closed her eyes she could see the sneering face of that little gobshite from Torchwood.

Rose was not generally given to violence as a first solution, her activities of the morning notwithstanding, but Marcus Pritchard was just one of those people with a face that begged to be punched and every time he opened his mouth, the temptation grew. She had barely restrained herself when he had begun his nattering on about Torchwood's interest in the Commander.

Five years since she had left, and this was still the best offworld liaison they could find. She snorted to herself, feeling very superior for a moment and congratulating herself on her decision to leave the organization

She locked the door to her office – or what passed for an office but was best described as a closet with a printer – and made her way down the creaking stairs, her mind on the organization that had both saved and condemned her.

There had been whispers as soon as she'd started at Torchwood, of course. The Director's mysterious daughter with a past shrouded in mystery was an anomaly of the sort that the organization rarely tolerated without investigation, but any attempt to probe her past had been quashed. That she was granted almost immediate access to the highest levels of the Institute had ruffled more than a few feathers. Rose knew that Pete had been heavy-handed with his integration of his newfound daughter, forcing her in like a square peg through a round hole, but he had wanted to ensure that Torchwood was staffed by those he could trust.

It was only when she had moved to the dimension cannon project that the whispers stopped following her everywhere, and that had only been because she worked with a very carefully selected team that worked primarily through academic research laboratories. Theoretical physicists had welcomed them, and extended an even warmer welcome to the influx of cash that followed the young hotshot researchers.

When Rose's paperwork had been fabricated out of whole cloth in this universe, Pete had ensured it reflected that she'd done well on her A-levels. Though she had not sat her exams in her own universe, years of learning at the Doctor's side had provided her a far deeper education than any coursework could. She had used her new educational status to publish her research, earning her MPhys while working at Torchwood which had put many of her critics to rest.

Growing up on the Estate, Rose had never felt as though university would be an option for her. Most people stayed in school only so long as it took to write their GCSEs and then they'd work. Rose had done much the same, having left school to follow Jimmy Stone around at the age of 16 with the expectation she'd never return to school. She had never excelled in school, and had been glad to leave it behind, but long after admitted to herself that she had never really made any effort to do well. She had felt it was not worth her effort to achieve academically if she was just going to work in a shop or a hair salon for the rest of her life.

But during her travels with the Doctor, Rose had found her natural curiosity piqued and her desire to understand the universe in its entirety grew. Many evenings were spent ensconced in the TARDIS library with a book in her lap or listening, rapt, to the Doctor as he explained some phenomenon or mathematical law, or the cultural context of a historical event they would soon visit. She had received an elaborately immersive education, and she had taken to it with gusto, finding that her intellect needed only some nurturing to come into its own. Rose had spent many nights wondering how many other promising scientific minds went stagnant in the small plot of the council estate, deprived of the nourishment they needed to grow.

She would never be able to calculate huge products in her head at the drop of a hat, she would never hold a candle to the Doctor, but she had developed a fluency which allowed her to understand the flowing language of mathematics that covered the whiteboard in her former lab.

Thoughts of the small laboratory workspace she had shared at uni cast her mind back to her graduation several months ago, when she had finally been addressed as Doctor Tyler, but she shied away from that painful memory. Proud as she was to have achieved what she did, the day had been soured and she could no longer draw any happiness from the memory.

She slammed that door in her mind. Not now. Not yet. Not here.

Rose pulled out her small diary after pulling closed the door of her small car. She made a note of her work on the negotiations this morning and scheduled a time to complete her report. She'd been well enough known before she had left Torchwood that a number of her contacts refused to speak to any human government without her as an intermediary, and her schedule filled up easily most days.

It took only fifteen minutes to drive home. She dropped her blue bag by the door, unlaced her boots, and went to start the kettle for tea. Neglected flooring creaked under her feet, her socks swishing softly over the ancient lino as Rose made her way to the back of her flat, to the small bedroom that was her own. Her blacks – standard-issue U.N.I.T. daily dress, black battle dress uniform suitable for combat - and t-shirt were cast off into the basket soon enough and she pulled jeans and a soft jumper from her wardrobe. It took her only a moment to pull on the soft, well-loved knit jumper and her favourite well-worn jeans.

A soft click, louder for the silence of the rest of the flat, sounded as she switched on the light in the washroom. She pulled off the makeshift bandage to examine the laceration at her clavicle. The inflammation was already starting to abate and it no longer throbbed. She applied some antibiotic gel, but still expected the injury would be gone within a day. Her wounds usually were.

Rose looked over her face as she brushed her hair out of the severe bun she was required to wear with her uniform. Her skin was now devoid of the heavy makeup she had worn in her younger years. Even she could see the weight of years, of pain, in her own eyes. Her fair skin was still pale and soft as it had been when she had last looked. As it had been every day for the last ten years. Not a wrinkle, not a freckle. Not a single crinkle or crease despite her hard life, even though she was nearly thirty by the calendar, but much older in her own linear time.

The Doctor and Rose had travelled together for two years by her calendar timeline. But when she added up the doubling back, the days that never were, the months spent suspended in the Time Vortex, Rose knew it had been well over four years that they had been together, as best she could figure. She had, since then, spent over four years working her way back to him after they had been separated at Canary Wharf, only to find out that her original universe was asynchronous with the one in which she now lived. That the timelines of the two universes did not seem to experience a linear relationship had been a matter of frustration to her, and Rose had long ago stopped trying to figure out precisely how old she was.

She flicked off the light, ending her inspection, and quickly re-wove her hair into a messy plait, a style she'd adopted for its convenience. Her trusty white kettle switched off as she re-entered her small kitchen and she poured some water in a mug to warm it as she reached for the bags of fragrant tea she favoured. It didn't hold a candle to her favourite tea, a powerful, spicy infusion she had once savoured at a bazaar on some out of the way moon. The Doctor had gifted her with a large tin of the beautiful tea on her birthday – as near as they could figure – that year; the scent of the blue and violet petals of her Ayurian spiceflower tea had greeted her every morning for months. Rose wondered if the Doctor still had it. The sweet but peppery imported tea was Earth's closest approximation, but lacked the soul of her birthday gift from so long ago.

A moment later, steaming mug tea in hand, she stood before the one closed door in her flat. Like the others, it was white and undecorated, bearing only a tarnished metal lever for a handle. Her hand shook as she reached for the handle, and she rested it there a moment, taking a breath to steel herself against the onslaught of memories.

Six months today.

It was time to open the door.

She slowly pushed the lever down and the door opened silently into a bedroom larger than her own.

A dark blue wardrobe stood in the corner of the room, deep in shadow, a flat-packed contraption they had picked up at some chain store. She remembered with a smile the day they had attempted to get the large box into the flat. It was not the first time she had regretted leasing the third floor walk-up. She had fallen on her bum at the bottom of the steps and had pulled him down into the grass with her. They had laughed, all full of joy and promise for a long future.

Rose ran a hand over the paneled door of the blue wardrobe, reminiscent of a different blue box that had done far more than hold clothes. She fingered the deep gouge in the front panel, where in a fit of rage and despair he had thrown his tray across the room.

Night was descending on Cardiff when she glanced out the window. The orange glow of streetlights outlined the window against the wall. She did not need light to know what was here. A finger of light touched the very top of the bed, and Rose reached over to smooth her hand over it.

The cold plastic handle on the headboard was rough under her fingers. Her eyes turned, at last, to the rest of the bed, the place she had avoided settling her gaze. A black plastic-covered mattress, stripped of its linens, rested on a frame of steel and plastic. Levers here and there were marked with colourful instructions, the cheeriness of the bright colours absurd in this room that still hung thick with despair.

He had hated hospitals. It would never have done for him to die in one.

Rose hated him for it, sometimes. For his forcing her to see him deteriorate with intimate detail. Not that she ever would have let anyone else care for him at the end. The room still smelled of the antiseptics she had used on every surface after his body had been taken away. Dust and antiseptics. His scent was gone.

Rose dropped onto the edge of the plastic mattress, the bed making a number of sharp creaks as it adjusted to her weight. Her fingers clutched at the folded-down hand rail at either side of her thighs. She curled inward, drawing her knees up to her chest, heels on the edge of the bed, her voice coming in rapid gasps as she attempted to regain her control.

"I hate you," she sobbed to no one, her soft voice carrying across the silent flat. The silence, the loneliness, drove her to anger. "You left me here!" She shrieked at the nearly empty room, throwing her mug against the wall where it exploded in an unsatisfying crash, hot liquid and shattered ceramic spraying outwards. "What happened to forever?"

The light outside the window flickered and dimmed, but the darkness had no response.