Work Text:
When she pulls him to her, when her lips crash into his, he sees it, just as he did when John Smith and Joan Redfern held the fob watch and imagined a life together.
Their vision was a life that would never be, something that could never happen. It wasn’t real.
When Rose steals his breath and his mind and thrills his nerve endings with the slide of her lips and the scratch of her fingernails in his hair, he sees it.
Rose in a white dress and blue chucks, walking towards him, escorted by her mother and the man she’s come to regard as her father.
A houseful of children. A hazel-eyed brunette girl smiling up at him... the child who makes him a dad again after so long. Twin boys and two more little girls running around the TARDIS console. Watching, tears stinging his eyes as he watches Rose comfort a heartbroken teen girl who looks a bit like his lost Jenny. The vision coalesces into himself sitting next to the love of his lives, bearing witness to five different weddings. There’s Christmas with Pete and Jackie and a little boy named Tony, and eventually with their own children and grandchildren... and great-grandchildren. Oh, their lives are bound by the number of heartbeats left in their singular hearts, but their timeline stretches on and on together, for much longer than he’d ever expected. So much time for family and love and the stars and time and nebulas to discover in a brand new universe.
The TARDIS groans and disappears and Rose pulls away, and the vision fades. He feels her dismay, her grief. He also feels her fingers tighten around his. She locks eyes with him.
And even though it’s not a given that anything he saw will come to pass, he sees it in her eyes. Rose saw it all, right along with him.
They will have to work for it, live and love on the slow path together, and although it will be hard and heartbreaking at times, it will be so worth it, because this isn’t some wish on a fob watch decades ago. This is now, and it is real. This is the Doctor and Rose Tyler in the TARDIS, loving and living a life together.
And it will be fantastic.