Rose II
I'm so sorry that it took me so long to write this, I just hadn't quite worked out how I wanted to do this. I was going to make this several chapters longer but have decided that marking this story the epilogue works much better.
We obviously got rid of the giant slugs, it wasn't even a challenge. It's what happened after that, well that was difficult. I hadn't been in a romantic relationship in thousands of years and navigating my way through one with someone I had genuinely hated for nigh on 4 millennia was extremely difficult. We had our ups and downs, less than a week into our relationship we had a huge, huge argument. The argument was about my 'if a sentient creature permanently harmed another sentient creature then I will shoot it' principle. The Doctor didn't like it (obviously, he's the eternal pacifist) after that fight I completely rethought dating him. I very nearly left him and went back to how I was living for thousands of years but luckily for all of us the Doctor followed me and reminded me that he loved me even if he disagreed with some of my principles, we left it at that and I have since changed my mind on that specific principle.
The second big argument came years later. We'd had our little arguments but really we just didn't spend masses of time together by ourselves. One of us would invite the other to our TARDIS and we'd go on a trip, if we where on the Doctor's TARDIS we'd most likely travel with the Pond's and if where on my TARDIS we'd take Melody. We never got into big arguments if we had people with us. If we were by ourselves however (which didn't frequently happen) for the first century or so we'd definitely get into a fight, not normally a serious one but a fight none the less.
The second big argument was when the Doctor found out about what I was doing to myself. I can't remember exactly how he found out, but he did and he was furious. He couldn't understand how I, the person that he loved so much hated myself so much. The argument was significantly worse than the first, the Doctor was furious and I was highly defensive which meant that the argument lasted far longer and was much more vicious. That time I again consider leaving, I was embarrassed about the Doctor finding out about me hurting myself and because the Doctor got so angry I got angry back. After a while that argument fizzled out because we loved each over so much and the argument only started because the Doctor loved me so much and couldn't understand how I hated myself so much.
The Doctor did try to get me to stop wearing my torture devices but for quite a while I wouldn't, I still thought that I didn't deserve to be happy because of the Paradox. I felt I didn't deserve to be happy and dating the Doctor made me so happy that I felt I had to continue to torture myself.
By the time I turned 4000 I had gotten out of that mentality, and had completely stopped the self torture. To this day (I'm nearing 5000) I still have nightmares about the Paradox and I do still feel guilty about it, but I have come to realise that I didn't intend to destroy a universe, it was an accident, a terrible, terrible, accident that killed trillions upon trillions of people but it was still an accident, and I paid the price dearly.
My relationship with the Doctor progressed slowly, incredibly slowly, (more slowly for me then him) partly because, as I've already told you, we where rarely by ourself and partly because I had genuinely hated him for approximately 3400 years.
Eventually though, our relationship has progressed a lot and when I was around about 3700 years old (the Doctor was 950 years old, what took 300 years for me took only 40 years for him) the Doctor asked be to marry him, I said yes and in less then a year (for both of us) we got married.
Even after we got married, we didn't initially spend all of our time with each other (I say we, I really mean that I didn't spend all my time with the Doctor, he spent nearly every day with me, because my lifespan is infinite and his is not, he has a very long life but it is still finite and I wanted to spread out the time I did have with him), the reason that changed is because less then a year after getting married I got pregnant.
I really should have expected it, I had always been very fertile. But I wasn't and it came as a huge shock.
When I was married to the Metacrise we tried for years to get pregnant, and I did, several times. I would always get pregnant, and I never had a first trimester miscarriage, but every single time I would get to six months and go into labour, and ever single time I would give birth to a dead baby. I had twelve pregnancy's with the Metacrisis, after the first six we had stopped trying but no birth control worked and after the 12th I resorted to drastic measures and got a hysterectomy (when I come back to life every one of my injuries are healed, even one's that are deliberate, all by body know is that I don't have a uterus and so it needed to grow a new one). I had to, I couldn't deal with another pregnancy, the worst almost wasn't even actually loosing the baby. No the hardest part was the hope.
At the start of my first pregnancy I was weary till the end of my first trimester but then I got really excited, I started shopping for baby clothes and all the New Mum things and when the stillbirth came out of the blue it left me devastated, and it certainly didn't help that the Metacrisis did the most Doctor things he ever did, and ran away from it. This was before my TARDIS had grown (and even if she had, she wouldn't have left without me) so he ended up spending 2 years in Africa. That was the first big problem in our marriage, we'd had our problems in the beginning (as is to be expected with a relationship that started how ours did) but nothing to that extent, the stillbirth would always have destroyed me but if my husband had been there for me it wouldn't have been half as bad. I buried myself in my work to try and distract myself from my pain, which isn't exactly a good idea and Mum never forgave the Metacrisis.
After he came back we tried for another baby, and again I got pregnant easily. That pregnancy was very similar to the first, I was slightly more wary but people kept assuring me that it was highly unlikely that I would have another stillbirth and I believed them and then again I went into labour at exactly six months and again gave birth to another dead baby. It was awful, and as unexpected as the first time but at least then the Metacrisis didn't run away from it so in that way it was easier. After a while I tried not to hope because I knew that it would make everything worse when the inevitable happened, but every single time hope would niggle it's way in, I couldn't stop it.
I was always in labour for a very long time (45 hours on average) and if it was just preterm labour they probably would have been able to stop it in all that time but it wasn't. Time goddesses and Metacrisis clones are not biologically compatible, we could (and did) conceive children but they would never be able to be born alive. That's why I would always go into labour at exactly six months, that's when my babies would die, that's when they'd reach a point where there impossibility would kill them, there own immune system would turn in on them and they would die. Within a few hours my body would catch on and start the ejection process, the incredibly painful, heartbreaking ejection process.
Honestly my hysterectomy was completly unnecessary, my marriage to the Metacrisis had fallen apart and the only thing that stopped us from getting divorced was that my TARDIS had finished growing. We traveled the universe together but more as distant friends then husband and wife.
Him dying wasn't really what turned me into the Widow, it was just the tip of the iceberg, the straw that broke the camels back, the final nail in the coffin, le coup de grace, the match in the powdered barrel. Loosing my babies built the bonfire and his death was just the match that set it alight, and the name 'The Widow' just felt right then.
When I found out I was pregnant with the Doctor's baby I really was far to surprised, I knew how fertile I was but after everything I went through in my first 12 pregnancy's I'd just sort of blocked it out of my mind. I was completely certain that again I would get to six months and then deliver a stillborn baby, and I was in an even worse position to deal with it then when I was married to the Metacrisis. When I was married to the Metacrisis I didn't exactly have good mental health but after several millennia's of extreme hatred (of both the Doctor and myself) I was in a much worse state, I was walking a thin line between just about coping and dissolving into mania, and losing another baby would definitely tip me into the side of mania.
When I found out about the baby I immediately stopped wearing my corset, I couldn't let myself hope that the baby would survive and that I'd finally be a mother, but I also couldn't continue to drive nails into myself and risk hurting my growing baby. That was my second torture device I stopped wearing, the first was the thumb tack headband and that wasn't really by choice. The reason I stopped wearing that was because I used it to torture Madame Kovarian and left it on her corpse. Really I didn't have much choice in stopping using the first two, I could have continued to wear a corset and then potentially hurt a baby that I though would die anyway but part of my just couldn't.
I was very hesitant to tell the Doctor about the baby, I didn't want to acknowledge it as if that would make things easier when (what I thought was) the inevitable happened. I very nearly didn't but I saw him when I was about 3 months pregnant and he noticed that something was off. I was far paler then normal, more shaky and altogether looked quite ill, and other then purely physically things he could tell from my body language that I was worried. When he asked me what was up with me I had to tell him, I just had to. He was so very excited, just like I knew he would be and the sight of him jumping up and down excitedly made me feel sick.
It wouldn't have been fair not to tell him about his child, but it also wasn't fair not to tell him that our baby would probably die. I just couldn't talk about all the babies I'd lost, I couldn't. I could talk about almost anything to him but not the stories of my dead babies. So I just let him be excited, because although it wasn't fair, it was easier.
I kept squashing down the hope that kept bubbling up inside me, I knew that it would be easier in the end if I hadn't hoped but seeing the Doctor, the man I was desperately in love with, get increasingly more excited made it so hard. I at least managed to convince him not to tell people until seven months, so that I didn't then need to tell people that my baby died.
I would have kept myself away from by excited puppy of a husband, but I knew that (assuming he didn't run away from it) he would be a huge help after the baby was born dead. The day I reached six months exactly was a day I will never forget (though with my incredible memory I haven't forgotten most of the days of my life) I spent the day in suspense, dreading the feeling of the first contraction. That feeling never came, I stayed on edge for the rest of that month, thinking that at some point I would surely go into labour, I didn't. It wasn't until I felt the baby kicking me that I calmed down, I had never felt by baby kicking me before, all my others died before they got a chance.
We started to tell people the happy news, and it was, the happiest of news. I was still somewhat suspecting to go into preterm labour, but I was more hopeful about my chances of becoming a mother than I had been since my second pregnancy. I carried my baby to 12 months (time lords have a longer gestational time than humans) and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. It seems that Time Goddess's and Time Lords compatible. The day my little Freya was born was completely surreal, I was in great pain for 80 hours (which was significantly longer then any of my other labours) fully expecting that my baby would be dead at the end of it, so when I was passed a screaming baby girl it hardly felt real. I almost had myself convinced that it was all a dream, except for the fact that my baby was nestled in my arms screaming her heart out, I have never heard a more beautiful sound. We named her Freya and to my delight (and the Doctor's dismay) she didn't have much hair but what she did have was unmistakably ginger.
We ended up have a lot more children, all girls and we were (and still are) extremely happy. The Ponds are no longer with us, they didn't die in New York (although it was close) but eventually age caught up on them but time (aka me) could give them one more gift, they died together in there sleep, together till the end.
I never managed to save Melody, her entire existence was a paradox and filled with so many fixed points for me to be able to risk saving her. Melody telling us she was off on an expedition to a library gave me a heart attack, the first natural death I've experienced. She my not have been my biological mine but Melody was my eldest child, I raised her and her quasi death was awful.
But in the end I got a far happier life then I deserved.
I am Rose
I am the Immortal Woman
I am the Killer of Evil
I am the Saviour of The Multiverse
And There's No One I Love More Then The Doctor
That's the series finished, and honestly it feels quite bizarre. I am going to write a Day Of The Doctor for this au, and something about the day the Doctor 'dies' and potentially several one-shots for this au as I come up with ideas, but that's the main storyline finished. Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed yourself.
The_Pineapple_Cake