(no subject)
Title: Ghost Stories
Author: biggrstaffbunch
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Rose Tyler is a ghost." Rose didn't make it to the alternate universe, and the Doctor must deal with the repurcussions of what she has gone through. Some things, even time can't change. And sometimes, forever isn't all it's cracked up to be. [post-Doomsday AU]
A/N: Part 2 of the Into the Howling trilogy, the sequel to She Falls Through Holes. Definitely read that first, or you may be more than a little bit lost. This one is for orange_crushed because she is made of awesome, and makes me feel like I'm writing in crayon. Hope you enjoy, I just had to tell a ghost story on Halloween. This wasn't even planned!
Part One
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All Rose does in the void is look for ways to end herself.
She hates to admit it, but the restlessness finally gets to her. Within seemingly no time at all, she's thought about putting a stop to her misery in at least a million ways because here in this place, there is no shortage of paths to damnation. There are piles of stones that are flat and sharp enough to cut into the tender skin of her wrist. Vines that are long enough, even on dead trees, to wrap around her neck. Withered bushes of berries, red and ripe and poisonous, waiting to be plucked and eaten.
For all the emptiness of hell, there is a veritable minefield of opportunities beckoning Rose, begging her to fold, to give in.
But then, there's no real question of entertaining these thoughts. The first time Rose seriously injures herself, tripping over her own feet and falling onto her knees, bruises blossom on her skin only to disappear in the next blink. The void is self-consuming--perhaps no one can die here because this place is death itself. Rose isn't sure. So she goes about her days without any real knowledge of her role. Every thought is alternately despairing or experimental, almost detached. Cataloging ways to kill herself because it's something to do with her driving desperation to find something more. To change, when things here are so unchanging.
In the end, it is that old enemy survival instinct that triumphs all other inclinations, and though her knees ache, Rose walks on.
Sometimes in respite, she thinks of home. Mundane things. How her mother is coping. What Mickey must be thinking. If anyone dreams of her at all, on the other side. Rose wishes she could dream of them, but the only thing that comes when the sun sets and the cold moon rises is a twinging stomach (she's still so hungry) and a mind that is getting weary.
"They'd be proud of me for keeping on," she whispers sometimes, though she knows that's not true. Everyone back home would be so disappointed in her, once they looked past the dried blood and the dirt and the sweat sticking to her skin. They'd see that she's giving up, beneath that indomitable shell of humanity, the skin that persists even though it breaks, the muscles that heal even after they tear. Her body still goes on and on even while her mind filters the days and nights into a cycle of never-ending moments, but god, she is so tired. Tired of seeing the sun rise and then set and the moon rise and then set, like a parody of how life is supposed to be. Reminding her of what she's left behind, what she can never get back again.
Hope died with the remains of the last sputtering Cyberman. Now, even the Daleks sit idle, no longer setting fire to shrubbery or screaming out idle threats. Rose is truly alone with no way out, and sometimes, she feels she would do anything for a way out. Anything.
In the meantime, she marks the days by scraping lightly around the width of her arm, the tip of an old bobby pin sharpened to prick her skin. One nick for every seven days. The expanse of flesh around her elbow is a mess now, but if she smears the blood away, the scabs tell her she's been here for almost fifty-two weeks. Almost one year.
Sometimes the days pass by so quickly or so slowly that she can't mark them, though. Sometimes she closes her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them, the shadows hang differently and she's on another road than the one on which she started out. So maybe it's been longer than a year. Maybe it's been shorter. Rose doesn't even know if there's such a thing as time in this place, if the accumulation of hours that she has ascribed as days is altogether false, just an arbitrary naming.
Maybe it's already been one whole forever, and she's just at the beginning of another.
The sky overhead rotates with every pulse-pound in her throat. The trees keep on dying, rotting like empty graves. Rose keeps walking.
And then there's him, the Doctor shade Rose first saw when she began her journey through the void. Moving among the leaves, tall and silent, with his coat billowing behind him, he is a silvery piece of wind, a wisp of man so finely drawn to each single detail. Those stupid shoes and his stupid hair and the stupid emptiness in his stupid, fake eyes. Rose knows it's not the Doctor. There's no way it can be, when the Doctor is in another world, a world more vivid and real than anything to be found here. (An unfamiliar jealousy burns in Rose's gut as she thinks of London smog settling in her pores.)
But this shade, this shadow, it chases her like a ghost. Like a memory. It doesn't say much, but when she makes the mistake of turning to it for comfort, maybe putting a hand out or letting her eyes rest fondly on its face, it disappears. Not meant for comfort, her.
Meant to be haunted. Meant to be dogged into an early grave.
Rose snorts. An early grave--yeah, right. She wishes. And then she scratches her neck, and thinks ironically of how she means that wish with every fibre of her being. Just for some peace. Just a little.
Her eyes fall shut, and when she opens them a split second later, she's on another path, headed in another direction, and another day starts again.
She fancies she hears the Doctor whistling a familiar tune as he follows her through Hell.
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Rose Tyler is a ghost.
She shows up on the third day of the new year, shortly after Astrid and the Titanic, while the Doctor is busy licking his wounds. He's tinkering under the TARDIS console, all big and bad and brooding, when the vortex sputters and spits and coughs out a huddled shape.
And suddenly, there she is.
Rose. Rose, standing stationary. Eeerily unmoving, even as the Doctor blinks and wobbles, hands braced against the console behind him.
She looks strange and beautiful in the pulsating glow of the TARDIS. Her skin is translucent and pale, a milky film over a map of veins. Though there is no breeze, her hair blows staticky and wild like skeins of gold thread snarled around a spool. Eyes as bottomless as space itself, and just as black, and lips curved in a waiting smile, a swallowing darkness edging past the brilliant white of her teeth. And her hands, her lovely hands--
She puts out her palm and wriggles her fingers and the arms of her jumper are torn, shredded so the Doctor can the muscles in her shoulders fluttering like the wings of a butterfly. Fragile, fine muscles, corded thin under skin. So delicate. So easily destroyed, every cell and atom of her.
She shouldn't be here, whole and complete yet so terribly empty. A projection of entirety, her every breath is exactly the way the Doctor remembers it, yet there's an unfamiliarity hanging about her, lighting the gauzy insubstantiality of her form like a lantern in the night.
He does not say a word, only watching. Waiting, taking in bit by bit that horrible blankness planted deep in her faded features that were once so bold. The Doctor thinks that if he were to smooth her brow, to tug on her wrist, to touch her at all, his hand would grasp nothing. He can't bear it, and so he holds onto his silence as steadily as if it were a tangible thing.
A week passes by and he does not say a word past her name, a questioning lilt to the long, drawn-out syllable. When she does not answer, he busies himself in some mindless task or another, all the while keenly aware of her presence everywhere around him.
(Rose Tyler is a ghost and it's wrong now, so wrong, because when her fingers reach for his, it's like spiderwebs clinging to his brow.)
In some ways, it's worse because she's still the same as she ever was.
He closes his eyes and her mouth still whispers words of sticky sweetness, candy-floss soft, heavy like smoke curling into the sky. He runs and her steps still echo a haunting cadence, each footfall hitting a moment later than his--a teasing disjunction, a taunting skipping rhyme. He flies through time and she still falls to the ground, her laughter reflecting off the TARDIS walls, the old roll-and-race of materializing in a foreign land, a big blue box spinning around and above them. It's exactly as he remembers, in so many ways.
But that's all that's left anymore. All that's ever been left. Recollections. Memories. Because everything dies. All things end. Even and especially Rose.
(Ah, though. Not Rose, after all. Rose persists, Rose lives on.
...Rose is gone.)
Martha has been gone exactly a week, TARDIS-time, and Jack has been gone much longer than that, if one cares to be precise. No one is around to see Rose now, sitting on the main console with nary a concern. Her toes skim the metal grating of the floor before plunging right through the surface, an abrupt amputation. The forced surgical cut, pieces of her tossed to the ether, the faint reminder of a green vortex whorling behind her head. Making her an angel or a daemon, he's not sure which, anymore.
The Doctor releases a sigh at the sight of her anklebones, and finally whispers "Please."
Rose's eyes meet his, and for a moment, he can see colorless roads stretching into infinity, a sky burning bloody red and a moon glittering brittle white. For a moment, he can see beyond the barriers, into neverending pathways and gnarled trees. For a moment, he knows without doubt where Rose has returned from, and why, and the truth of it--the almost relief of knowing for sure--brings a thunderous ache to his chest, a rising bile to his throat.
He pressed a button and it obliterated his entire planet once, but in this second, the feeling of responsibility weighing his head down is far worse. Far heavier. Because it's his love that made her into what she is now. His love that made her love him, and her love that in the end did--
What? What did she do? More to the point, what is to be done now? Nothing. Not nearly enough, not more than the paltry little he already has done, it seems. He didn't go back for her. He didn't look for her. He lost her, and she lost herself and how is he supposed to find her now? How is he supposed to fix her?
A tear blots the vision from his eyes, cold and wavering in place, never falling.
"Oh, Doctor." Rose says, blinking. Compassion flitters through the brown of her gaze, melting into a raging, bittersweet black. Her voice is song without melody, the sky without stars. "Have you missed me?"
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Things shift sometime after Rose opens up a square of skin on her other elbow, the macabre calender extending a ways beyond a mere year any longer.
The sun blisters her flesh so that even a scant breeze schafes against her painfully. It seems that the dead space has progressed rapidly into a study of extremes, into a thousand circles of a thousand new tortures, into a typical rendering of Hell, each new day holding new horrors in store. Rose watches as the sky bleeds and she measures the hours by the degrees with which the sun burns hotter, flames higher. The whites flare into red then dim to black periodically, and she's reminded of that old joke, the one the Doctor used to tell over breakfast on the TARDIS:
"What's black and white and red all over?" Once, she'd rolled her eyes and flicked a page of the Daily Sun right at the Doctor's nose. Now, though, she knows the answer, and the knowledge is at once epic and anticlimatic.
The Howling. This place, her jail, it's black and white and red all over, black clouds and white fire and red sky. Shapes atop the rocks lining the looping paths, Daleks frozen in time, screaming their unearthly screams and Cybermen lying like husks, legs kicked up into the air, dust around them thick and choking.
And the Doctor. The Doctor or his shade, following her on every road she walks, his hands in his pockets and his gaze brushing her in just the way that his fingers used to.
He doesn't say a word to her, most times. Though she talks to him. Sometimes she confides in him stories, things she never got to share with him when they were travelling together. Jimmy Stone, and the time she pushed Mickey into the sandbox, and the sweets she stole from the market just because she could. The red bicycle when she was twelve. Load of good the present does her now, she sighs, when all she's got are her thighs and calves and battered feet.
Sometimes she makes fun of him, tells him stuff she's been dying to say ever since she met him. The way his tender care of his hair makes her look positively slovenly, how she knows he wears those specs just to look brainy instead of needing them for his vision, the fact that she found his previous self sexier but the current one made her heart hurt in ways not barely qualifiable as merely love.
Once, she yells at him. Screams at his echo-self until she's hoarse, all her anger and hurt and fear pouring out as she shouts and rages. She tells him she wishes he had never picked her up. She tells him he should have told her he loved her. She tells him to stop following her, if he's not going to save her.
"You told me you weren't ever going leave me, Rose," he admonishes when she cries, when she's too overwhelmed to scream anymore. Tears stripe the sunken hollows of her cheek, but he only stands there, looking at her. "You wanted to be with me for the rest of your life, didn't you? Well. You're not dead yet, missy, so here I am."
Can a person even die if they're already in Hell? No, she supposes, and she's not dead yet, true. She's worse than that.
She's eternal.
And so are the Daleks and so are the Cybermen and so are the fires and the sun and the grey, grey roads snaking into the crimson horizon. And so is the Doctor.
She once told him no-one would ever split them up. These days, the irony is not exactly lost on her. Not even a little bit, not at all.
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"Yes. I've missed you," the Doctor says, and the words are worked out around a ragged breath full of tears.
Fires have burned in his gaze and tragedies have slept in all that he never said, but this body has never cried in front of her. Never shared that part with her, never been quite that human for her. How different he must seem, with moisture tracking lines beneath his ancient eyes. So different than who she left behind. An alien before, a Time Lord who watched his planet crumble to ash and who kept his hearts in a cage of distance and superiority. And now, he's just a man. A man who has been broken by a little human girl barely two decades old.
(Rose is laughing, and the sound is warped, wrong.)
"I missed you every day for the past year." The Doctor's voice is flat. "I missed you for so long. And now you're here. Only, how? How are you here, Rose?"
Because the Doctor knows better than to be happy about seeing her again. He knows better than to look at her in wonder and joy, and she knows better, too. The youthful softness of her face has melted away, her expressions rough-hewn and harsh, all colorless lines and edges. The smile on her face, once so unabashed and free, is more of a grimace, gums and canines bared in dangerous, predatory warning. Rose looks wary and worn, sharp and gruesome, her features blurry and her gait strange and stilted. Like a cracked china-doll, or a wounded animal. Like a lost soul.
Like she's been walking forever, and perhaps she has. With him, the Doctor, as the ever-elusive goal.
She swallowed Time to save him once. This time, Time swallowed her. Snuffed her out, trapped her between worlds, between realities. And to come back from that, to cross a chasm as hungry and boundless as dead space, well--it's not going to be for hugs and hand-holding.
He can taste that fact in the undercurrents of her quiet.
Still he continues, his voice pitched low and awful. "When the transmission failed, I guessed--I feared--" He stops, eyes unseeing. "And I was correct. I was correct and I still didn't do a thing, did I? Useless. So useless."
(Six impossible things before breakfast, he said, and he wasn't even around see her die.)
His head bows in implicit, yearning apology. His hands shake as he raises them up in supplication. "You've been following me around for days," he whispers. "I've felt you. I've seen you." He closes his eyes and falls to his knees. "But you're dead, Rose. All that you are is an imprint, an impossibility." His next word is a moan. "Revenge."
At this, she moves. "Oh, no, love," she croons delightedly, stepping forward. She bends to let her lips linger near his ear, and the chill of her skin prickles like needles. "I'm not vengeance."
("I'm a promise.")
Forever, and all that. Just as they both wanted.
One way or another.
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The shade disappears one day after a pathway opens up beneath Rose's feet, almost spilling her into the boundless unknown below.
She walks, turning around periodically, and she realizes there's no dark form in the forest, no familiar-but-empty eyes staring at her from between branches. Two suns set and two moons rise before she stops staring into the trees, and she finally guesses from the hole in her chest that he is truly gone. Whatever he was, whatever he was supposed to mean, he's gone.
Despite herself, Rose cries into her sleeve, tears without noise, hot against her frozen skin. Rose doesn't know how long she goes, laying her cheek against her sodden jumper. But when she's done, she squares her shoulders and continues on. Just another way she's lost him, she figures, and fuck all, she's so tired of him leaving her behind.
A hundred weeks she's been here. One hundred weeks, if the silvery scars lining her skin are any indication. One hundred weeks in dead space and she's finally reached a point where she wants to see what will happen if she stops walking. Wants to know whether there is ever any escape.
Nothing to lose, after all. Now she really is alone, all alone. Not even her own head will conjure up a hallucination to keep her company.
Once, she turned the Dalek Emperor to dust. Now, she scoffs at the thought of cowering, being cowed. At crying anymore at the loss of her tagalong ghost, because though the drop below is dark and uncertain, the suspended, endless roads that she keeps traveling seem worse. She can't keep putting one foot in front of the other, not when each step leads her deeper into this place where she doesn't belong.
Anything for a way out, she once said. Anything at all.
Maybe the shadow disappearing is a good thing. Maybe it has freed her, in some small way.
This, she realizes, must be the day her faith finally runs out. The day she is truly--finally--angry. "Followed him forever," she whispers to herself, "Least he could do is stick around as a bloody figment." But even dream-Doctor's have somewhere to be, she laughs, and she gives a half-smile as the wind kicks up and the dust tickles her throat.
She stands on a road that leads to more road that leads to more road, but suddenly, where it counts at least, there's finally no more pathways to take. Only the knowledge that there are two choices.
One: Turn around and find another path, a path that maybe, someday, might lead out of this place. No guarantees. There never are, those. Just hope, and faith in some possible tomorrow. A Doctor who didn't believe enough to come find her and a Rose who is strong enough to keep waiting.
Two: Jump. Stumble off the rocks and let the hot air lift her body up and then slam her down, breaking her limbs into jagged pieces, dashing her skull against groups of stones, letting the blood and guts and flesh and bone run into something less contained then this prison, this body. Better than trudging on till the end of time, innit? Only time is circular, so--
Either way, there's no end. Is there? Rose just wants there to be an end.
She closes her eyes.
She jumps.
And the ground rushes up to meet her, and the Cybermen wail and the Daleks scream, and when she opens her eyes--
--she's in the TARDIS once more.
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Jack has a machine, the Doctor finds out.
"A ghost machine, Doctor," Jack clarifies over the crackling vortex-muddied reception of the TARDIS telephone. "Nanotechnological quantum tranducers. Takes human emotions and makes them like imprints--ghosts, to me and you. Or maybe just me, since you're all alien and superior and you know better, right? Anyway, yeah, feasibly it could reverse the process--convert the ghost into human emotion, compress it back into the device. But if you don't mind me asking, why would you need it?"
The Doctor's not proud of how he's treated Jack, but his voice is steel, nonetheless. When it comes to Rose, Jack is the sort of person who would barge into the TARDIS with guns blazing, asking questions and getting in people's faces, doing the right thing, the good thing. But when it comes to Rose, the good thing, the right thing to do here--
No. If it's to be done, no one but the Doctor himself will do it. He owes Rose that much, and more.
"I do mind you asking, actually," the Doctor says. "I'll be in touch." He hangs up, and Rose snorts.
"Ooh," she says, her voice raising goosebumps along the Doctor's neck. "Rude. Still so rude. You can't just take the boy for a spin, tell everyone he's dead, leave 'im stranded in the future, then expect him to be all nice-like, Doctor. Just not on."
"I'm sorry, Rose," the Doctor says softly. He's become accustomed to saying this. Doesn't know if it'll ever be enough. "So, so sorry."
"Do you know," Rose says, ignoring him. "I fell the length of what seemed like entire buildings and didn't even break a bone? Probably I was dead as soon as I jumped, yeah? Or maybe even before. Maybe as soon as I crashed into the void. Anticlimatic ending if there ever was one. Would've rather gone with the Gelth, myself." Her eyes slit and she affects a high drawl. "'M so glad I met you,'" she mimicks, rolling her eyes. Her voice lowers. "Least you would've gone with me, then."
The Doctor tries not to shiver at the bitterness in her tone. Reminds himself that this is not Rose. That this is just a ghost. An imprint. An emotion. Rose, the Rose he knew, is dead.
Somehow, that thought isn't any easier to handle than this bastardization of who she was.
"Anyway," and her voice is bright again, her moods mercurial, "point is, if I'm remembering my time with the heart of the TARDIS correctly--and Doctor, death clarifies quite a bit, that was less than a proper snog you gave me in the end--Jack can't die. I fixed him properly enough. So I'm wondering, how'd he first find out? Fisticuffs? Knife? Alien tech? Nasty bout of syphillis?"
"Gunshot, actually." The Doctor smiles grimly. "You know that you did it, Rose?"
"Shot him? No, sorry, was a bit busy walking the immortal roads."
The Doctor flinches. "No. I mean, you know that you gave him life. Forever. With your all-seeing memory of when the Time Vortex was inside you? You saw that, surely? What decisions like this cost people? What they do? Why couldn't you leave it be? Why couldn't you just let him die--"
"Why didn't I die, you mean." Her voice is knowing. "I chose Hell over a world without you, Doctor. Be honored. You with your all-seeing memory of what the Time Lords know or could know...you saw that, surely? The way it could have been, me trapped on the other side in another universe, never seeing you again." Her feet swing. "It meant death, it meant the void, but it also meant possibility. It meant chance. And all I wanted was that chance. To see you again. It's always see you again. Eternity."
The word is chilling. The Doctor shivers.
"But even, then...in that place?" Rose continues, her eyes faraway. "I wanted to die. For a moment. For a flash. And then I did."
Her feet go through the console and he looks at her, all crackly and blurred along the edges.
"But I said I'd never leave you," and her voice is so young.
The Doctor turns. Remembers frozen waves sparkling overhead, and the warmth of her hand in his. Remembers being alive, well and truly alive with this woman, and thinks that nothing, not anything and most certainly not him, is worth this half-life.
Jack has a machine. That is what's important.
"But you said you'd never leave me," the Doctor echoes, and his voice is so, so old.
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Rose isn't surprised to find the TARDIS primed for traveling sooner than later, despite her sudden appearance and the Doctor's subsequent emotional incapacitation. If anything, his greatest skill is compartmentalizing well enough to leave one place behind and get to another. Manifold and massive as his issues may be, he won't speak of them until they all come spilling out of him at once, a great purging at whatever new location he's got in store.
Perhaps another genocide of a genocidal alien race. Perhaps another benevolent game of hide and seek until his raw power is unearthed, terrible punishments pouring from his hands. Perhaps another opportunity for him to be a lonely god, an oncoming storm, an explosion that burns for days and leaves debris in its wake.
Oh, the things they could do together, he and Rose. The simplicity of it, of who he could become if he was unleashed. If he let go...
Maybe because she is dead now, and the humanity that was once her core now feels further and farther away. Or maybe because of the void, and the frustration of every avenue in sight being closed to her for far too long. But there is something appealing about the prospect of watching him lose control. For once. For her.
She sits back, and though he doesn't speak to her, doesn't even look at her, he is tuned to her like a radio dial looking for a signal. His body hums with awareness, and she slides her hand over the console, skims it over his knuckles, dances her fingers up his arm. His jaw clenches, and a slight shudder trips down his spine, the hairs at his neck slightly raised. He wants her the way an addict wants a drug, hating himself for it. She can see the loathing in his eyes, and the sadness, and the love.
"Naughty," Rose laughs, because someone has to find it funny.
The TARDIS spins on, and the next adventure awaits.
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Part Three
Author: biggrstaffbunch
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Rose Tyler is a ghost." Rose didn't make it to the alternate universe, and the Doctor must deal with the repurcussions of what she has gone through. Some things, even time can't change. And sometimes, forever isn't all it's cracked up to be. [post-Doomsday AU]
A/N: Part 2 of the Into the Howling trilogy, the sequel to She Falls Through Holes. Definitely read that first, or you may be more than a little bit lost. This one is for orange_crushed because she is made of awesome, and makes me feel like I'm writing in crayon. Hope you enjoy, I just had to tell a ghost story on Halloween. This wasn't even planned!
Part One
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All Rose does in the void is look for ways to end herself.
She hates to admit it, but the restlessness finally gets to her. Within seemingly no time at all, she's thought about putting a stop to her misery in at least a million ways because here in this place, there is no shortage of paths to damnation. There are piles of stones that are flat and sharp enough to cut into the tender skin of her wrist. Vines that are long enough, even on dead trees, to wrap around her neck. Withered bushes of berries, red and ripe and poisonous, waiting to be plucked and eaten.
For all the emptiness of hell, there is a veritable minefield of opportunities beckoning Rose, begging her to fold, to give in.
But then, there's no real question of entertaining these thoughts. The first time Rose seriously injures herself, tripping over her own feet and falling onto her knees, bruises blossom on her skin only to disappear in the next blink. The void is self-consuming--perhaps no one can die here because this place is death itself. Rose isn't sure. So she goes about her days without any real knowledge of her role. Every thought is alternately despairing or experimental, almost detached. Cataloging ways to kill herself because it's something to do with her driving desperation to find something more. To change, when things here are so unchanging.
In the end, it is that old enemy survival instinct that triumphs all other inclinations, and though her knees ache, Rose walks on.
Sometimes in respite, she thinks of home. Mundane things. How her mother is coping. What Mickey must be thinking. If anyone dreams of her at all, on the other side. Rose wishes she could dream of them, but the only thing that comes when the sun sets and the cold moon rises is a twinging stomach (she's still so hungry) and a mind that is getting weary.
"They'd be proud of me for keeping on," she whispers sometimes, though she knows that's not true. Everyone back home would be so disappointed in her, once they looked past the dried blood and the dirt and the sweat sticking to her skin. They'd see that she's giving up, beneath that indomitable shell of humanity, the skin that persists even though it breaks, the muscles that heal even after they tear. Her body still goes on and on even while her mind filters the days and nights into a cycle of never-ending moments, but god, she is so tired. Tired of seeing the sun rise and then set and the moon rise and then set, like a parody of how life is supposed to be. Reminding her of what she's left behind, what she can never get back again.
Hope died with the remains of the last sputtering Cyberman. Now, even the Daleks sit idle, no longer setting fire to shrubbery or screaming out idle threats. Rose is truly alone with no way out, and sometimes, she feels she would do anything for a way out. Anything.
In the meantime, she marks the days by scraping lightly around the width of her arm, the tip of an old bobby pin sharpened to prick her skin. One nick for every seven days. The expanse of flesh around her elbow is a mess now, but if she smears the blood away, the scabs tell her she's been here for almost fifty-two weeks. Almost one year.
Sometimes the days pass by so quickly or so slowly that she can't mark them, though. Sometimes she closes her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them, the shadows hang differently and she's on another road than the one on which she started out. So maybe it's been longer than a year. Maybe it's been shorter. Rose doesn't even know if there's such a thing as time in this place, if the accumulation of hours that she has ascribed as days is altogether false, just an arbitrary naming.
Maybe it's already been one whole forever, and she's just at the beginning of another.
The sky overhead rotates with every pulse-pound in her throat. The trees keep on dying, rotting like empty graves. Rose keeps walking.
And then there's him, the Doctor shade Rose first saw when she began her journey through the void. Moving among the leaves, tall and silent, with his coat billowing behind him, he is a silvery piece of wind, a wisp of man so finely drawn to each single detail. Those stupid shoes and his stupid hair and the stupid emptiness in his stupid, fake eyes. Rose knows it's not the Doctor. There's no way it can be, when the Doctor is in another world, a world more vivid and real than anything to be found here. (An unfamiliar jealousy burns in Rose's gut as she thinks of London smog settling in her pores.)
But this shade, this shadow, it chases her like a ghost. Like a memory. It doesn't say much, but when she makes the mistake of turning to it for comfort, maybe putting a hand out or letting her eyes rest fondly on its face, it disappears. Not meant for comfort, her.
Meant to be haunted. Meant to be dogged into an early grave.
Rose snorts. An early grave--yeah, right. She wishes. And then she scratches her neck, and thinks ironically of how she means that wish with every fibre of her being. Just for some peace. Just a little.
Her eyes fall shut, and when she opens them a split second later, she's on another path, headed in another direction, and another day starts again.
She fancies she hears the Doctor whistling a familiar tune as he follows her through Hell.
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Rose Tyler is a ghost.
She shows up on the third day of the new year, shortly after Astrid and the Titanic, while the Doctor is busy licking his wounds. He's tinkering under the TARDIS console, all big and bad and brooding, when the vortex sputters and spits and coughs out a huddled shape.
And suddenly, there she is.
Rose. Rose, standing stationary. Eeerily unmoving, even as the Doctor blinks and wobbles, hands braced against the console behind him.
She looks strange and beautiful in the pulsating glow of the TARDIS. Her skin is translucent and pale, a milky film over a map of veins. Though there is no breeze, her hair blows staticky and wild like skeins of gold thread snarled around a spool. Eyes as bottomless as space itself, and just as black, and lips curved in a waiting smile, a swallowing darkness edging past the brilliant white of her teeth. And her hands, her lovely hands--
She puts out her palm and wriggles her fingers and the arms of her jumper are torn, shredded so the Doctor can the muscles in her shoulders fluttering like the wings of a butterfly. Fragile, fine muscles, corded thin under skin. So delicate. So easily destroyed, every cell and atom of her.
She shouldn't be here, whole and complete yet so terribly empty. A projection of entirety, her every breath is exactly the way the Doctor remembers it, yet there's an unfamiliarity hanging about her, lighting the gauzy insubstantiality of her form like a lantern in the night.
He does not say a word, only watching. Waiting, taking in bit by bit that horrible blankness planted deep in her faded features that were once so bold. The Doctor thinks that if he were to smooth her brow, to tug on her wrist, to touch her at all, his hand would grasp nothing. He can't bear it, and so he holds onto his silence as steadily as if it were a tangible thing.
A week passes by and he does not say a word past her name, a questioning lilt to the long, drawn-out syllable. When she does not answer, he busies himself in some mindless task or another, all the while keenly aware of her presence everywhere around him.
(Rose Tyler is a ghost and it's wrong now, so wrong, because when her fingers reach for his, it's like spiderwebs clinging to his brow.)
In some ways, it's worse because she's still the same as she ever was.
He closes his eyes and her mouth still whispers words of sticky sweetness, candy-floss soft, heavy like smoke curling into the sky. He runs and her steps still echo a haunting cadence, each footfall hitting a moment later than his--a teasing disjunction, a taunting skipping rhyme. He flies through time and she still falls to the ground, her laughter reflecting off the TARDIS walls, the old roll-and-race of materializing in a foreign land, a big blue box spinning around and above them. It's exactly as he remembers, in so many ways.
But that's all that's left anymore. All that's ever been left. Recollections. Memories. Because everything dies. All things end. Even and especially Rose.
(Ah, though. Not Rose, after all. Rose persists, Rose lives on.
...Rose is gone.)
Martha has been gone exactly a week, TARDIS-time, and Jack has been gone much longer than that, if one cares to be precise. No one is around to see Rose now, sitting on the main console with nary a concern. Her toes skim the metal grating of the floor before plunging right through the surface, an abrupt amputation. The forced surgical cut, pieces of her tossed to the ether, the faint reminder of a green vortex whorling behind her head. Making her an angel or a daemon, he's not sure which, anymore.
The Doctor releases a sigh at the sight of her anklebones, and finally whispers "Please."
Rose's eyes meet his, and for a moment, he can see colorless roads stretching into infinity, a sky burning bloody red and a moon glittering brittle white. For a moment, he can see beyond the barriers, into neverending pathways and gnarled trees. For a moment, he knows without doubt where Rose has returned from, and why, and the truth of it--the almost relief of knowing for sure--brings a thunderous ache to his chest, a rising bile to his throat.
He pressed a button and it obliterated his entire planet once, but in this second, the feeling of responsibility weighing his head down is far worse. Far heavier. Because it's his love that made her into what she is now. His love that made her love him, and her love that in the end did--
What? What did she do? More to the point, what is to be done now? Nothing. Not nearly enough, not more than the paltry little he already has done, it seems. He didn't go back for her. He didn't look for her. He lost her, and she lost herself and how is he supposed to find her now? How is he supposed to fix her?
A tear blots the vision from his eyes, cold and wavering in place, never falling.
"Oh, Doctor." Rose says, blinking. Compassion flitters through the brown of her gaze, melting into a raging, bittersweet black. Her voice is song without melody, the sky without stars. "Have you missed me?"
|
Things shift sometime after Rose opens up a square of skin on her other elbow, the macabre calender extending a ways beyond a mere year any longer.
The sun blisters her flesh so that even a scant breeze schafes against her painfully. It seems that the dead space has progressed rapidly into a study of extremes, into a thousand circles of a thousand new tortures, into a typical rendering of Hell, each new day holding new horrors in store. Rose watches as the sky bleeds and she measures the hours by the degrees with which the sun burns hotter, flames higher. The whites flare into red then dim to black periodically, and she's reminded of that old joke, the one the Doctor used to tell over breakfast on the TARDIS:
"What's black and white and red all over?" Once, she'd rolled her eyes and flicked a page of the Daily Sun right at the Doctor's nose. Now, though, she knows the answer, and the knowledge is at once epic and anticlimatic.
The Howling. This place, her jail, it's black and white and red all over, black clouds and white fire and red sky. Shapes atop the rocks lining the looping paths, Daleks frozen in time, screaming their unearthly screams and Cybermen lying like husks, legs kicked up into the air, dust around them thick and choking.
And the Doctor. The Doctor or his shade, following her on every road she walks, his hands in his pockets and his gaze brushing her in just the way that his fingers used to.
He doesn't say a word to her, most times. Though she talks to him. Sometimes she confides in him stories, things she never got to share with him when they were travelling together. Jimmy Stone, and the time she pushed Mickey into the sandbox, and the sweets she stole from the market just because she could. The red bicycle when she was twelve. Load of good the present does her now, she sighs, when all she's got are her thighs and calves and battered feet.
Sometimes she makes fun of him, tells him stuff she's been dying to say ever since she met him. The way his tender care of his hair makes her look positively slovenly, how she knows he wears those specs just to look brainy instead of needing them for his vision, the fact that she found his previous self sexier but the current one made her heart hurt in ways not barely qualifiable as merely love.
Once, she yells at him. Screams at his echo-self until she's hoarse, all her anger and hurt and fear pouring out as she shouts and rages. She tells him she wishes he had never picked her up. She tells him he should have told her he loved her. She tells him to stop following her, if he's not going to save her.
"You told me you weren't ever going leave me, Rose," he admonishes when she cries, when she's too overwhelmed to scream anymore. Tears stripe the sunken hollows of her cheek, but he only stands there, looking at her. "You wanted to be with me for the rest of your life, didn't you? Well. You're not dead yet, missy, so here I am."
Can a person even die if they're already in Hell? No, she supposes, and she's not dead yet, true. She's worse than that.
She's eternal.
And so are the Daleks and so are the Cybermen and so are the fires and the sun and the grey, grey roads snaking into the crimson horizon. And so is the Doctor.
She once told him no-one would ever split them up. These days, the irony is not exactly lost on her. Not even a little bit, not at all.
|
"Yes. I've missed you," the Doctor says, and the words are worked out around a ragged breath full of tears.
Fires have burned in his gaze and tragedies have slept in all that he never said, but this body has never cried in front of her. Never shared that part with her, never been quite that human for her. How different he must seem, with moisture tracking lines beneath his ancient eyes. So different than who she left behind. An alien before, a Time Lord who watched his planet crumble to ash and who kept his hearts in a cage of distance and superiority. And now, he's just a man. A man who has been broken by a little human girl barely two decades old.
(Rose is laughing, and the sound is warped, wrong.)
"I missed you every day for the past year." The Doctor's voice is flat. "I missed you for so long. And now you're here. Only, how? How are you here, Rose?"
Because the Doctor knows better than to be happy about seeing her again. He knows better than to look at her in wonder and joy, and she knows better, too. The youthful softness of her face has melted away, her expressions rough-hewn and harsh, all colorless lines and edges. The smile on her face, once so unabashed and free, is more of a grimace, gums and canines bared in dangerous, predatory warning. Rose looks wary and worn, sharp and gruesome, her features blurry and her gait strange and stilted. Like a cracked china-doll, or a wounded animal. Like a lost soul.
Like she's been walking forever, and perhaps she has. With him, the Doctor, as the ever-elusive goal.
She swallowed Time to save him once. This time, Time swallowed her. Snuffed her out, trapped her between worlds, between realities. And to come back from that, to cross a chasm as hungry and boundless as dead space, well--it's not going to be for hugs and hand-holding.
He can taste that fact in the undercurrents of her quiet.
Still he continues, his voice pitched low and awful. "When the transmission failed, I guessed--I feared--" He stops, eyes unseeing. "And I was correct. I was correct and I still didn't do a thing, did I? Useless. So useless."
(Six impossible things before breakfast, he said, and he wasn't even around see her die.)
His head bows in implicit, yearning apology. His hands shake as he raises them up in supplication. "You've been following me around for days," he whispers. "I've felt you. I've seen you." He closes his eyes and falls to his knees. "But you're dead, Rose. All that you are is an imprint, an impossibility." His next word is a moan. "Revenge."
At this, she moves. "Oh, no, love," she croons delightedly, stepping forward. She bends to let her lips linger near his ear, and the chill of her skin prickles like needles. "I'm not vengeance."
("I'm a promise.")
Forever, and all that. Just as they both wanted.
One way or another.
|
The shade disappears one day after a pathway opens up beneath Rose's feet, almost spilling her into the boundless unknown below.
She walks, turning around periodically, and she realizes there's no dark form in the forest, no familiar-but-empty eyes staring at her from between branches. Two suns set and two moons rise before she stops staring into the trees, and she finally guesses from the hole in her chest that he is truly gone. Whatever he was, whatever he was supposed to mean, he's gone.
Despite herself, Rose cries into her sleeve, tears without noise, hot against her frozen skin. Rose doesn't know how long she goes, laying her cheek against her sodden jumper. But when she's done, she squares her shoulders and continues on. Just another way she's lost him, she figures, and fuck all, she's so tired of him leaving her behind.
A hundred weeks she's been here. One hundred weeks, if the silvery scars lining her skin are any indication. One hundred weeks in dead space and she's finally reached a point where she wants to see what will happen if she stops walking. Wants to know whether there is ever any escape.
Nothing to lose, after all. Now she really is alone, all alone. Not even her own head will conjure up a hallucination to keep her company.
Once, she turned the Dalek Emperor to dust. Now, she scoffs at the thought of cowering, being cowed. At crying anymore at the loss of her tagalong ghost, because though the drop below is dark and uncertain, the suspended, endless roads that she keeps traveling seem worse. She can't keep putting one foot in front of the other, not when each step leads her deeper into this place where she doesn't belong.
Anything for a way out, she once said. Anything at all.
Maybe the shadow disappearing is a good thing. Maybe it has freed her, in some small way.
This, she realizes, must be the day her faith finally runs out. The day she is truly--finally--angry. "Followed him forever," she whispers to herself, "Least he could do is stick around as a bloody figment." But even dream-Doctor's have somewhere to be, she laughs, and she gives a half-smile as the wind kicks up and the dust tickles her throat.
She stands on a road that leads to more road that leads to more road, but suddenly, where it counts at least, there's finally no more pathways to take. Only the knowledge that there are two choices.
One: Turn around and find another path, a path that maybe, someday, might lead out of this place. No guarantees. There never are, those. Just hope, and faith in some possible tomorrow. A Doctor who didn't believe enough to come find her and a Rose who is strong enough to keep waiting.
Two: Jump. Stumble off the rocks and let the hot air lift her body up and then slam her down, breaking her limbs into jagged pieces, dashing her skull against groups of stones, letting the blood and guts and flesh and bone run into something less contained then this prison, this body. Better than trudging on till the end of time, innit? Only time is circular, so--
Either way, there's no end. Is there? Rose just wants there to be an end.
She closes her eyes.
She jumps.
And the ground rushes up to meet her, and the Cybermen wail and the Daleks scream, and when she opens her eyes--
--she's in the TARDIS once more.
|
Jack has a machine, the Doctor finds out.
"A ghost machine, Doctor," Jack clarifies over the crackling vortex-muddied reception of the TARDIS telephone. "Nanotechnological quantum tranducers. Takes human emotions and makes them like imprints--ghosts, to me and you. Or maybe just me, since you're all alien and superior and you know better, right? Anyway, yeah, feasibly it could reverse the process--convert the ghost into human emotion, compress it back into the device. But if you don't mind me asking, why would you need it?"
The Doctor's not proud of how he's treated Jack, but his voice is steel, nonetheless. When it comes to Rose, Jack is the sort of person who would barge into the TARDIS with guns blazing, asking questions and getting in people's faces, doing the right thing, the good thing. But when it comes to Rose, the good thing, the right thing to do here--
No. If it's to be done, no one but the Doctor himself will do it. He owes Rose that much, and more.
"I do mind you asking, actually," the Doctor says. "I'll be in touch." He hangs up, and Rose snorts.
"Ooh," she says, her voice raising goosebumps along the Doctor's neck. "Rude. Still so rude. You can't just take the boy for a spin, tell everyone he's dead, leave 'im stranded in the future, then expect him to be all nice-like, Doctor. Just not on."
"I'm sorry, Rose," the Doctor says softly. He's become accustomed to saying this. Doesn't know if it'll ever be enough. "So, so sorry."
"Do you know," Rose says, ignoring him. "I fell the length of what seemed like entire buildings and didn't even break a bone? Probably I was dead as soon as I jumped, yeah? Or maybe even before. Maybe as soon as I crashed into the void. Anticlimatic ending if there ever was one. Would've rather gone with the Gelth, myself." Her eyes slit and she affects a high drawl. "'M so glad I met you,'" she mimicks, rolling her eyes. Her voice lowers. "Least you would've gone with me, then."
The Doctor tries not to shiver at the bitterness in her tone. Reminds himself that this is not Rose. That this is just a ghost. An imprint. An emotion. Rose, the Rose he knew, is dead.
Somehow, that thought isn't any easier to handle than this bastardization of who she was.
"Anyway," and her voice is bright again, her moods mercurial, "point is, if I'm remembering my time with the heart of the TARDIS correctly--and Doctor, death clarifies quite a bit, that was less than a proper snog you gave me in the end--Jack can't die. I fixed him properly enough. So I'm wondering, how'd he first find out? Fisticuffs? Knife? Alien tech? Nasty bout of syphillis?"
"Gunshot, actually." The Doctor smiles grimly. "You know that you did it, Rose?"
"Shot him? No, sorry, was a bit busy walking the immortal roads."
The Doctor flinches. "No. I mean, you know that you gave him life. Forever. With your all-seeing memory of when the Time Vortex was inside you? You saw that, surely? What decisions like this cost people? What they do? Why couldn't you leave it be? Why couldn't you just let him die--"
"Why didn't I die, you mean." Her voice is knowing. "I chose Hell over a world without you, Doctor. Be honored. You with your all-seeing memory of what the Time Lords know or could know...you saw that, surely? The way it could have been, me trapped on the other side in another universe, never seeing you again." Her feet swing. "It meant death, it meant the void, but it also meant possibility. It meant chance. And all I wanted was that chance. To see you again. It's always see you again. Eternity."
The word is chilling. The Doctor shivers.
"But even, then...in that place?" Rose continues, her eyes faraway. "I wanted to die. For a moment. For a flash. And then I did."
Her feet go through the console and he looks at her, all crackly and blurred along the edges.
"But I said I'd never leave you," and her voice is so young.
The Doctor turns. Remembers frozen waves sparkling overhead, and the warmth of her hand in his. Remembers being alive, well and truly alive with this woman, and thinks that nothing, not anything and most certainly not him, is worth this half-life.
Jack has a machine. That is what's important.
"But you said you'd never leave me," the Doctor echoes, and his voice is so, so old.
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Rose isn't surprised to find the TARDIS primed for traveling sooner than later, despite her sudden appearance and the Doctor's subsequent emotional incapacitation. If anything, his greatest skill is compartmentalizing well enough to leave one place behind and get to another. Manifold and massive as his issues may be, he won't speak of them until they all come spilling out of him at once, a great purging at whatever new location he's got in store.
Perhaps another genocide of a genocidal alien race. Perhaps another benevolent game of hide and seek until his raw power is unearthed, terrible punishments pouring from his hands. Perhaps another opportunity for him to be a lonely god, an oncoming storm, an explosion that burns for days and leaves debris in its wake.
Oh, the things they could do together, he and Rose. The simplicity of it, of who he could become if he was unleashed. If he let go...
Maybe because she is dead now, and the humanity that was once her core now feels further and farther away. Or maybe because of the void, and the frustration of every avenue in sight being closed to her for far too long. But there is something appealing about the prospect of watching him lose control. For once. For her.
She sits back, and though he doesn't speak to her, doesn't even look at her, he is tuned to her like a radio dial looking for a signal. His body hums with awareness, and she slides her hand over the console, skims it over his knuckles, dances her fingers up his arm. His jaw clenches, and a slight shudder trips down his spine, the hairs at his neck slightly raised. He wants her the way an addict wants a drug, hating himself for it. She can see the loathing in his eyes, and the sadness, and the love.
"Naughty," Rose laughs, because someone has to find it funny.
The TARDIS spins on, and the next adventure awaits.
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Part Three