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After Torchwood and the ghosts, after making a choice and having it taken away, Rose was stuck staring at a blank white wall. The tears had stopped, her voice had given out, and all she could do was stare at the wall, at the overwhelming white that blocked out everything else.
Her mum finally managed to guide her out of the lever room, murmuring soft reassurances in her ear as they both followed Pete and Mickey into this strange new universe.
Rose couldn't pay attention to anything. Not to the words, not to the half-familiar sights, or even the familiar comfort of Jackie's arm around her. All she could focus on was the blinding whiteness even though they were halfway across the city from the damn wall.
Days passed. Weeks. Rose settled into a routine so she had something to occupy her time, something to distract her from the fact that everything in this new universe, this universe she refused to refer to as her own, seemed muted.
The missions at Torchwood, when there was one, barely got her adrenaline pumping before she found herself back at a desk doing paperwork. The food was all bland and even the stars (a cold comfort to her; mournful reminder and wistful hope at the same time) didn't look as bright as they once had.
And still at night, behind closed eyelids, her world narrowed to an expanse of white, reinforced drywall that was more to her than just a wall. A wall she could break -- voids and universal barriers she could not.
It was just that when she was running with the Doctor, it seemed like it would never in. She'd told him forever, promised him forever, and never once stopped to think that forever would not be long enough. In the time they'd had, everything had been so vivid. Hundreds of sunsets, foods bursting with flavor, the smell of apple grass wafting up to welcome her to a new planet. And of course there had been the shivers that she felt through her whole body when the Doctor brushed up against her arm, the warmth that filled her when their hands were intertwined for no reason other than they wanted them to be.
Without him, she was left with dulled impressions of everything, pale substitutes of feeling when she was used to sipping on the ambrosia of life.
And oh when he appeared on that beach, ghostly and flickering she thought for a moment, just a moment, that she could be free. That he could rescue her from this makeshift life and they could both live again. But just like everything else in this new, godforsaken universe, he was just a shadow of what he was supposed to be.
No touch.
Everything was fading and unfinished and wrong as she was duped one more time by a universe full of inadequacies, a final stab that rendered her breathless as she realized the tarnished substitute she’d been handed—an aborted goodbye and a dull, monochrome beach in the stead of the brilliant gold and a reunion—original and substitute both masquerading under the same name that she’d once scattered through time and space as her own.