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Rose Tyler, defender of the Earth.
What a laugh.
You want to accept the title, but you simply can’t. Because you know that the defender of your planet (and the rest of the universe) will always be him. Be it your old Earth or this new one with zeppelins in the sky and no TARDISes saving people. He’ll always be the knight in shining armor, the liberator and redeemer.
He flies around in that wonderful blue box, bringing both joy and ruin at the same time. Looking back on it all, you see that whatever happiness you had felt with him had always been either followed or induced by some destruction.
Always.
(And you miss it so, so much.)
That’s the hardest part, you imagine, about being him. That’s why he never mentioned Sarah Jane or any of his other companions- they all deserted him in one way or another and left him with ache after ache in his hearts.
And that's why he never looks back. Why he always pushes onward, evading painful questions like the plague.
‘No. Not you,’ he’d said when you asked if he’d forget you.
That bloody liar. (You still hear him say it, sometimes, when you’re all alone with no sound but the memories.)
That’s all he does, really. Save a few planets, leave people behind. Meet an alien race, leave people behind. Rewrite history, leave people behind.
And, despite knowing he’ll never change - you knew the entire time that you’d eventually lose him, could never let yourself forget that little bit of trivia - you mourn for him. Being trapped, away from him, in a parallel fucking universe does no wonders for your sanity. You know your mother and Pete are worried, but you can’t really bring yourself to care.
You know he'd be worried, but if he were here, you wouldn't need to worried about, right?
You don’t really care about much anymore, nothing other than that damned Dimension Cannon. It could either save or kill you. (You don’t even know if the piece of shit will even work right. It could send you straight to the Void, with no chance of survival.) But you figure death is probably better than never seeing him again.
Anything is better than never seeing him again.
Because if you live another day without him, you know you’ll choke. Every breath you breathe is a mouthful of air without him, and you can’t stand that. And what kills you the most is that you’re having trouble remembering his voice, his laughter. Everything fades away eventually, but why that? That, of all things, should stay forever.
(Rose- this is what they call obsession! You've finally gotten yourself so stuck on a bloke that you can't even revert back to life as a normal human being!)
But it’s horrifying to have to even think that you may have to live a normal human life for the rest of your days, eating beans on toast and ending up with two-point-five kids and a picket fence. Normal has become a negative word, and extraordinary is all you'll let yourself settle for, now.
When you and the rest of the team working on the Canon finally manage to reconfigure it so that the temporal energy will propel you back across the walls of reality, you hold your breath as you set the coordinates.
You send a quick prayer up to whoever might be listening and press the button. Please, if anyone's out there, let this work- I promise that if this works I'll become a nun and live in a convent and help poor kids and donate everything to a charity. Pleasepleaseplease I don't want to die, I just want to see him again please-
In a sudden, blurry whirlwind of blue plasmatic energy, you cross dimensions.
(And, okay, you're not really going to become a nun or donate everything to charities, but it's the thought that counts, right?)
Crossing across alternate universes is sometimes described as 'jumping' across dimensions.
You've done it a few times, and in your experience (which, really, is pretty limited, but still so vast) you can only describe it as dreaming.
Existing in that strange in-betweenness of passing above the Void is disorienting and you almost always get to the other side feeling as if you've vomited, run a triathlon, and vomited again. A doctor back at Torchwood told you that the 'dreaming' part is your subconscious struggling to shield your mind from the impossibility of being that close to the Void. It picks the closest memory and translates into a dream.
You're usually okay with that, seeing as you have quite a lot of happy memories, but you've got so pretty fucked-up ones too. But the last few trips had been filled with the Beast on Krop Tor predicting you would die in battle.
However, your current lucid-dream state takes place in primary school, when all the children had been told to chose a poem and recite it to the parents and the rest of the class. You had asked Jackie for a simple poem, something easy and memorable, and she handed you a thick volume of long, wordy stanzas, all sorrowful and boring. Naturally, you chose the shortest one. You don't remember many of the lines themselves, but you recall the poet said, "Nothing gold can stay," and you've never agreed more than now.
Although, in truth, nothing stays.
You wonder, sometimes, when everything's quiet and still, how you'll live. How you'll die. If you'll do anything at all, and if the Doctor will come for you. (You hope for a resounding yes from your conscience, but you know, deep down, that if you need to get anything done in this world, you need to do it yourself.
How true is life, anyway? Are you even in this world? Do you even exist? Are you just a story in someone's head?
You hate being quiet still because you are so emptily reminded of your impending oblivion. Alone with just your thoughts, you are strongly reminded of how, eventually, you're just going to be a footnote, a crumbling skeleton in a coffin six feet under, and how, sometime in the future, no one will remember you. Not even the Doctor.
When you traveled with him, you felt invincible. Immortal. How can you die, really, when you're so thoroughly embedded in both the past and the future? There's always an echo of you, somewhere, somehow, living on in some adventure.
But you know how quick everything will be over. You'll just be a story, eventually forgotten.
(The worst part of these 'dimension jumps' is that horrible feeling of loneliness you end up with, that feeling that you can’t shake- a feeling of realization. A terrifying sort of understanding.)
You see him and you can’t breathe. He’s exactly as you remember. Tall, skinny, insane hair, liquefying brown eyes, billowing coat-
And then, almost arbitrarily, he’s dead.
Dead.
Him, dead. Even the very thought was unbelievable.
It’s so sudden you can’t even comprehend it properly. One moment you’re running to him, smiling and elated, and the next he’s been shot by a Dalek and struggling to breathe.
You want to scream. You’ve barely come back from that awful alternate reality where he's drowned, and what do you find? Him. Well, that part was good, but then you came across a very dead him.
Please, you plead. If there’s some deity out there, you hope it’s listening. Please let him come back.
One more miracle, that's all I want.
Surprise, surprise, he’s figured yet another way to cheat death. Very Doctor-y of him. “It’s the curse of the Time Lords,” he’d told you.
And yet you can’t help but think how bloody useful that whole little regeneration energy thing is. Some curse.
Although, you speculate, it would get pretty boring after a while. Life, that is. Living was irksome enough for so long, but it you could spend eternity with anyone, it would definitely be him. No hesitation.
Your brief moment of panic is over and the Doctor is alive and well, with the same face. That was always a plus.
He stands up, smiles at you like he can’t believe you're there (he probably can’t, bless him), and resumes saving the world. Average day for him, really.
When the Daleks are defeated and most of the companions are respectively dropped off at Earth (see? There he goes again, leaving people) and it’s just you and him - and Jackie, Donna, and the Meta-Crisis, but who’s counting? - and you’re so happy you can barely speak.
You’re here, with him, and everything is so perfect you have a sneaking suspicion it won’t last for another ten minutes.
And you’re right, of course. (When have you been wrong when sensing disaster? He never believes you, not even when you knew, you knew those Victorian flame ghost things were bad news, and he didn't listen, he never listens-)
And for the final blow, one last sucker punch- it’s his own damn choice to make you leave.
And as you stand on that beach with two Doctors, one who you now hate and one you hate even more, you know that no matter how hard you try, no matter how long you fight, he’s just going to leave you here. He’s going to desert you here in a parallel universe and you won’t ever get back to him now. It was his plan this whole time, and nothing you say can dissuade him. The sudden helplessness is gut wrenchingly familiar, and you remember white walls and screaming and -
And your heart breaks with an audible crack. You know he hears it with his bullshit superior Timelord ears. (He better hear it- you're not going to let him leave this without regret, without some sort of pain as a penance for ditching you when there was a chance for another forever)
You want to cry, but will yourself to stay strong as he looks at you sadly. (Fucking puppy dog eyes- no, don't let it get to you, it'll only make this worse. Make yourself go from glass to steel. Glass to steel- you are steel.) The Meta-Crisis whispers into your ear.
“I love you.”
You inhale sharply. You want to slap him across the face.
But one look at him with his big, brown eyes and then he’s kissing you, and you’re melting against him, and he’s exactly like you remember it, all bittersweet and wonderful, and you hear the vrwoosh, vrwoosh of the TARDIS leaving.
You break away from the kiss, the tears breaking free. He left. He didn’t even say goodbye, the bastard.
He promised he would never leave you. He promised.
The Meta-Crisis takes your hand and you cry silently.
Rose Tyler, defender of the Earth.
Crying over a bloke.
(This needs to stop, now, but you can't, can't stop these fucking tears as they pour from your eyes like a dam's been broken-)
He holds you closer, and you consider pushing him away and yelling at him, telling him to shove off, but you sense that he's just as lost here as you are.
You sense there's a prospective something here. A partnership, a friendship, or even a relationship, something that's probably going to be really awkward and chock-full of arguments and maybe even love.
And you think that, just maybe, you'll be okay here.