June 3, 2016
"In the field of experimental physics, the degree of Doctor Philosophiae is awarded to Rose Tyler."
Her silk-lined scarlet robe swished softly over the dark wool of the formal uniform worn beneath. The sun caught her violet sleeves as she climbed the few steps to the stage. Breathe, Rose told herself. Don't trip. She reached the smiling chancellor who clasped her hand in both of his own. His lips moved, forming words of congratulation, but Rose did not hear them. She felt the soft, warm skin of his hands leave her own as he turned to grasp the black leather folio which held her degree.
Degree in hand, she shook the hands of the line of robed scholars who, smiling, bid her congratulations for her achievement. She could not hear the thousand people in the amphitheatre, nor the words of the academics who had guided her over the previous years. She smiled and nodded in response to their unheard words. Her eyes darted from the face of the Dean of the Faculty of Science to the shadows at thefar side of the auditorium, well away from the stage.
He came.
The man met her eyes, even at this distance, and flashed her a weak smile. Rose ached to step towards him, but was ushered along, back to her seat. Once seated, she craned her neck in an attempt to see back into the shadows, but he was gone.
The convocation dragged on for another hour. Speakers and awards, pomp and circumstance and modern interpretations of ancient ceremony. Nearly a thousand years this institution had stood and it seemed determined to squeeze some acknowledgement of every single one of those years into the day. Rose stifled a yawn more than once.
She donned her mortarboard cap as she exited the hall into the bright sunlight of a June day. It didn't take long before she had the air knocked out of her by a blonde blur rushing at her to throw his arms around her ribs in a crushing hug. "Thanks, Tony," she huffed as he let her go, a laugh bubbling up from within her.
"Doctor Tyler," the nine year old said, grinning. "Sounds good don't it?"
"Yeah, yeah I think it does," she agreed with a grin, the tip of her tongue peeking out between her teeth. "God, it's weird to hear that, though."
"Congratulations, sweetheart," cried her mum, approaching with open arms to collect her daughter in a tight hug. "I am so proud of you." Jackie's voice was thick with emotion as she spoke into her daughter's hair. "So proud."
Pete ambled towards them, clasping the shoulder of an acquaintance in greeting as he wove his way through the teeming crowd of people in fine dress interspersed with ebullient graduates in academicals.
"Well done, Doctor Tyler," he said with a grin, extending his hand to Rose. She took his hand, shaking it once, firmly. Professionally. A decade she had been his acknowledged daughter, but he still couldn't bring himself to hug her spontaneously. Rose's heart clenched a bit, wondering if her real dad would have hugged her.
"Let's have a picture, Rose. Over here." Jackie tugged her along by her arm, out of the crowd. "Tony, take my phone and take a couple will you?"
In the shade of a towering white oak. Jackie and Pete's arms came around Rose's shoulders and all three beamed at the camera. The youngest Tyler snapped a few photos with the phone before handing it back. For the next quarter hour, Rose didn't speak a word as Jackie had her move this way and that, pose with Tony or Pete, or under a particular tree, or in the sunlight.
"Mum, you must have a hundred pictures by now," she sighed before opening her mouth wide to stretch her jaw, the ache of forced smiles burning lightly. "My cheeks are starting to hurt." She glanced around for Pete who she spotted up the stairs, chatting amiably with the chancellor.
Jackie huffed, hand on her hip and looked at her daughter with a severe expression. "Now, Rose. This is a big day! You're the first to graduate uni in generations. Let me be a little excited for you if you won't be for yourself. This is a happy occasion and I haven't seen a real smile out of you yet."
"Mum…" Tony droned. Jackie's eyebrows shot up and she opened her mouth to chide him, but Rose cut in.
"Mum, I am happy. Really." She offered as genuine a smile as she could. "It's just been a long day and that speaker would just not shut up." Mollified, Jackie's expression softened.
"Well, if I can drag your father away we might get to our dinner reservations before Tony's getting his own degree." She turned and scanned the crowd for her husband. "Oi! Pete!"
He turned, a bit startled, and waved at her in acknowledgement. Obviously bidding goodbye to the woman he was speaking with, he made his way back towards them, whipping out his phone to text their driver to pick them up.
"'M just going to run in to change, 'kay?" She didn't wait for their response before making her way back into the building to shuck the too-warm academic garb.
Turning the corner back towards the side room that had been set aside for the women to change in, she broke out into a wide grin. Sitting by the small table placed at the end of the corridor, she saw the unmistakeable silhouette of messy hair and the shine of those specs he'd always been fond of.
"You came," she breathed, rushing toward the man by the window.
He took a deep breath, his eyes closing at the effort. "Of course." Another breath. "Now I can call you Doctor too." He reached out a skeletal hand, placed it on her arm, and looked up into her eyes, a thready smile on his chapped lips. The soft sound of his oxygen concentrator hummed below the level of her notice.
Rose had seen him just that morning, as she'd bid him goodbye and turned his care over to the visiting nurse. He'd seemed too weak to come and she had called to cancel the transport.
But here he was, his usually dull eyes shining with pride. He wore his beloved blue suit, though it was clear it hung over a thinner frame. His brown hair, thick and wild as ever, was styled in the organized chaos he'd always loved. She put her hand over his and took a seat beside him in the velvet-upholstered chairs nearest him.
"So," he said softly, taking as deep a breath as he was able. "Is it Captain Doctor Tyler or Doctor Captain Tyler now?" His smile grew a bit and she shook her head in response.
"It's Rose, just Rose. Look at me, collecting titles like that, though," she quirked a smile at him. "Who'd have thought – girl from the estates like me." She laughed softly.
He raised her hand to his lips, planting a soft kiss on her knuckles. "I never doubted your brilliance."
"First time I met you, you called my entire species stupid apes." The sparkle in her eyes made it clear she was only teasing.
He shrugged. "Exceptions to every rule." They lapsed into companionable silence, hands joined and resting on the small table. He looked out the window, the light filtered through the leaves of the ancient oaks outside, throwing the lines of his face into sharp relief. His cheeks were dark hollows, outlined by the transparent tubing that supplied his oxygen, his eyes sunken to deep pools. Rose looked down at their hands, his so frail over her own.
She had to think hard to remember the days, years past now, when his body had hummed with vibrant energy, with sheer joy at being alive. When he had been unable to stay still for even a moment. Even sitting down to tea, he'd have one leg bouncing at all times. The man who sat across from her, stillness etched into his every feature, was not the man she had travelled the universe with. He was an echo, a shadow, of the Doctor he had been.
"Will you come out to eat with us? Mum's got reservations at some posh Portuguese place…"
"No, I think I'll head back." He paused, breathing deeply. "Wouldn't want to slow you up on your special day." Rose could see the skin pulling in around his collarbones with each laborious breath.
"John, please come," she pleaded, using the name he'd taken as his own. "If you're up for it, that is."
He shook his head slowly. "Not today. But I do have something for you." He withdrew a thin package from inside his jacket and pushed it across the table to her.
She moved to open the shiny blue paper, but he stilled her with a hand. "Later. Go spend time with your family now." He pulled her hand to his lips again. "Congratulations, Rose."
"Thank you. It means a lot that you came." Rose stood and bent over to kiss his cheek gently. "I'll see you later, yeah?"
"Yeah." He pushed a lock of hair behind her ear and dropped his hand to the arm of his wheelchair. Rose glanced down the hall and saw his attendant. With a gentle squeeze of his shoulder, she turned away, entering the changing room to shed her gown.
She wasn't hungry anymore.
There was no later for them.
Rose entered her Cardiff flat a couple hours later, having driven straight home, and noted immediately the absence of sound. No monitor, no concentrator. No tap-tap-tap of the attendant nurse texting her friends as John slept. There was nothing save silence.
She found the note from her neighbour on her kitchen table a moment later.
Your phone is off. Maria's at A&E with John – University Hospital.
Go as soon as you see this and turn on your phone.
-Colin
Rose's stomach dropped to her feet. Still clad in her woolen dress uniform, hair plaited neatly at the nape of her neck, she turned on a heel and bolted out the door. She had no recollection of the mad rush to the hospital; it seemed only a moment later she was at the information desk in A&E.
"John Lord. Came in with a nurse," she panted.
"Are you family?" the clerk asked evenly, glancing
"Yes. Where is he?"
The clerk rose and came round the desk. "Follow me, please." She waved her badge over a reader, opening the sliding doors that separated the waiting and treatment areas. "Down the left, last room on the right."
Without even pausing to thank her, Rose strode off in the indicated direction.
He wasn't in the room when she reached it, but she found his nurse attendant rise to meet her. "Rose," she breathed in relief.
"What happened?" Rose ground out, eyes jumping left and right, attempting to find any sign of him.
"He's at CT," the plump woman told her, taking Rose's hand firmly, she guided her to a seat. "We think he's had a stroke."
She was grateful for the nurse's hand on hers as the air rushed out of the room. She knew this was likely, with his deteriorating condition, but that made the news no easier to bear.
"When? What happened?" she repeated her question, softly this time. Distant.
Maria patted her hand gently. "We were on our way back from Oxford in the transfer van and he just couldn't focus. He…" she paused, closing her eyes. "He seized. Badly. Was barely breathing when we got here."
Rose felt tears prick at her closed eyelids. "What did the doctors say?"
"Took him straightaway to CT. We only just got here a little while ago."
At that moment, the porter came in, pulling a wheeled bed behind him. He reconnected the cardiac leads from the mobile monitor on the bed to the wall-mounted one beside it and then exited without saying a word.
John lay on the bed, his face peaceful in apparent sleep. His chest rose and fell slowly, the pale skin around his clavicles drawing in with each breath. Rose stepped over to stand beside him, taking his hand in her own. His skeletal fingers were pale against her sun-darkened skin.
She looked up as the doctor entered. Dr. Gwen Davies, a formidable Welshwoman in her late fifties, was someone Rose knew well from U.N.I.T. before the physician had left to pursue the somewhat less strenuous field of emergency medicine. It was only to her that Rose trusted John's care, owing to his physiological quirks, and she knew that Gwen would have seen him at home had she not been at the hospital today. Rose's breath caught in her throat at the unfamiliar sight of sorrow in the dark-haired woman's eyes.
Gwen stood opposite Rose and met her gaze. "I am so sorry, Rose. John's had a very significant bleed into his brain." She took a deep breath, steeling herself for what came next. Rose's heart thumped wildly in her chest. "There is no coming back from this."
Surprising herself with her ability to keep her voice level, Rose asked, "Are we at the end?"
"I'm afraid so," the doctor said quietly.
"Then let me take him home."
Officially, John Lord was born in Exmouth. January 1st, 1981. Only son of Ulysses and Penelope Lord, both of London, and raised mostly in Essex.
But those who loved him knew the truth.
He was from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. He was the last of his people while at once being the very first– the only human-Time Lord biological metacrisis to exist.
Officially, he died of a brain bleed secondary to metastatic cancer, at home with his wife on June 15th, 2016, in Cardiff, aged 35 years.
He was, in truth, over nine hundred years old at his death and had spent the majority of his life protecting all of creation. He was also only five years old, a body forged in the heat of battle. An old soul in a young body; poisoned by the very process that had created it.
Officially, John Lord was cremated at Thornhill.
Rose Tyler built the funeral pyre by the side of a river, deep in the woods, along the line of the rift. Tony helped, carrying the driest brush he could find to line between the layers of logs. In telling her the story of his last encounter with the Master, John had described the funerary rites of his people. While she knew she could not speak the ancient words in the rolling, musical tongue of the Time Lords, she could do this for him.
The people who called him family gathered and, together, carried the far-too-light, red-shrouded body to the pyre and lay him among the fragrant boughs.
Rose, Tony, Jackie, Pete, and Gwen stood silently, reflecting on the enigmatic man they had all loved in their own ways as the blue sky gave way to the orange of dusk.
There was no ceremony, no words of hope or comfort spoken. Rose lit a branch of apple wood and circled the pyre, lighting the layers of dry brush as she went.
Her tongue tripped on the syllables of the only Gallifreyan she had ever learned, as she spoke his name into the fire that rose to consume what remained of the man once known as the Doctor.