[ role play for rude_not_ginger; breaking her heart into two. ]

[roseoflegend]

Rose had been certain she was losing her mind. There was no other logical explanation that her mind was willing to come up with, no rationality that would break itself through the unrelenting, dense clouds of disbelief and prove a reasonable enough result as to how he had come. Had she not known him implicitly, without needing so much as a second

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[rude_not_ginger]

John Smith, the man who was the Doctor but wasn't, had eighty-five pages to correct for the class he taught at the local university, three suits to iron, and at some point he needed to get a haircut. Right now, however, he was really, really concerned about this frozen pizza he'd attempted to make in the oven.

Donna had been no good at cooking and neither had the Doctor, so John should've been really unsurprised at the half-burned, half-undone mess lying on the plate. It was his real last-ditch effort before he gave up to call Indian food. He lit a candle on the middle of the table and tried to cut away the burned and gooey bits on the pizza before tossing it onto the table as well just as he heard Rose enter.

He grinned.

"Hello!" he called. "Made dinner."

[roseoflegend]

Made dinner. Even before the smell could reach her, Rose knew that somewhere along the line of trying to cook, there had to have been a take out menu involved. She wasn't the best at whipping up anything edible - Jackie hadn't passed on the best culinary skills in her genetic pattern to her daughter - and so more than once there had been a rather frightening endeavor of a meal which had gone unconsumed for fear of illness while they had all but fallen against each other in fits of laughter and gone out for dinner. But he had tried, consistently, to cook and while there was still a ways to go for either of them, his effort made a pang of aching tenderness flare slightly to the side of her breastbone.

I don't know how I'm going to do this.

"Yeah?" she managed before her voice flickered, wavering around the end of the single word, and she shoved her hands into her pockets as if to find runaway courage there. All she found was fourteen cents in change and a gum wrapper.

"I.."

[rude_not_ginger]

"Well, I suppose made is really subjective. But that little pizza in the center, that's all my doing. I wouldn't reccomend eating it unless you really like carbon or dough, though."

He grinned again, then moved back into the kitchen to grab a bottle of wine. John was a lot more adept to feeling out others' emotions than the Doctor was, and for some reason Rose was unhappy. Or at the very least somewhat upset. He could tell. He'd find out sooner or later, he knew.

"It's been a year since we got back here," he said, coming back into the room with the wine. "Well, it was a year a few days ago, but you know how bad I've always been with timing. Figured it was worth it to celebrate."

[roseoflegend]

The pain in her chest was tightening and Rose was beginning to truly wonder if she was going to be able to breathe again. Her heart was ripping itself into two pieces, and she didn't know if they were equal halves or completely uneven, but it didn't seem to matter because it was still hurting. And the hurting wasn't going to go away.

When he came back she was waiting, closer now to where he had been standing, and Rose lifted her hands to take the wine bottle from him. Her hand stopped, lightly, on his wrist and she was struck again by the warmth of his skin and how, almost impossibly, that same warmth seemed to transfer into his eyes. He never looked at her in any other way.

But I have to go."You are so.." It wasn't what she had meant to say initially at all, but it was all that came out and Rose couldn't take it any longer. She set the wine bottle down and threw her arms around his neck. Her nose was squashed against his shoulder and she didn't care, and when she shut her eyes she could feel the hot burn of tears in the corners