After The Fall
When he visits her room, he never lingers. The pink duvet on the bed remains as rumpled as it had been when they had made easy morning love (sunshine, brewing tea, much too domestic for his taste) the day of the wall and invisible claws slicing through his chest, laying ruin to what had been a pair of healing hearts.
Fear. And agony. Oh, so much agony.
The universes had committed a heinous crime in stealing his Rose. Because who was he, without his pink and yellow girl in his arms, without the soft thrumming of her single, human heart against his palm, without her Just-for-Doctor smile, without her amber brilliance?
He, who had bowed to her alter as she burned like a raging sun, the humble follower of a golden goddess with hazel eyes and skin gentle like the sun dipping into the sea. He, who had forgotten all of the rules because she dared to ask. He, who had never told her, not once allowed her to look inside his mind, never even contemplated a mind link, a silver thread winding through their blood, their arteries, their hearts.
Because one day, there will have been a wall. Or a bullet. Or a pulse twitching to a stop. And the Doctor, an expert in the field of the leave-taking, hadn't wanted tohurt.
"I'm sorry," he whispers to a girl on the other side of the fall.
This does not feel like self-preservation.