Chapter Text
Rose dreams, sometimes. She learned very early on that her dreams are what most people would consider nightmares, but they’ve never really bothered her. Her mum is always in them, and where Donna Noble goes, Rose feels safe.
She’s tried to talk to mum about them. She’s supportive and she’s kind, but she never fails to change the subject with a hitch in her breath. Like she’s sad, or lost, somehow.
Gran is worse. She has a hair trigger between tolerating Rose’s childish whimsy and shutting it down completely. She won’t abide any mention of spaceships or stars or monsters, and she’s openly banned scrawny white men from either of their homes. It’s odd, but gran is an odd woman.
She should be normal. She looks normal, there’s nothing particularly strange about her tone or her affect. But there’s a grief in her, the same grief that’s mirrored in Donna.
Rose doesn’t understand it. It’s not her job to try, they’re supposed to be the ones who work to understand her. They do, for the most part, and so does her dad.
He’s never in her dreams. Rose wonders why, because she loves him just as much as mum and gran and great-grandad. The three of them are woven into her imagination, but Shaun isn’t.
She’s floating, now. She thinks she’s in space, but it’s hard to say for certain. Rose knows she’s asleep, though, which means mum will show up sooner or later. She swirls her hands through the vastness of the void, and she waits.
It doesn’t take long for the noise to start.
She loves that noise, a groaning vworp-vworp-vworp that precedes the strangest blue box she’s ever seen. It’s an impossible box; endless and ever-changing. It reminds her of her shed, or perhaps the shed reminds her of the box. They’ve been present for her whole life and she feels equally at home in both.
They call it a TARDIS, her mum and that wisp of a man she always appears with. Rose doesn’t recognize him, not really, but there’s a familiarity to him that she can’t explain.
Rose greets the TARDIS with open arms every time she dreams. She never remembers it in the morning.
It swings to a stop in front of her, opening up its doors to usher her inside. Rose pats the door frame as she steps into a room that’s much bigger than it should be.
They’re fighting, mum and the Doctor.
…the Doctor, yes, that’s his name. Rose shakes her head ruefully. She can’t believe she’d forgotten the Doctor. The name will be gone when she wakes, but for now Rose leans against the wall to enjoy the show.
“—not my fault!” the Doctor shouts.
“Oh, sure,” Donna hisses. “‘Course, how could I be so foolish to think that you, the alien, should know how to fly your own damn ship!”
The Doctor scowls and whacks a rubber mallet against the controls. “I know how to fly, Donna.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
“Oh, would you like to have a go?” He isn’t facing her while he speaks, his attention fully focussed on the fire growing out of the console. “I’d love to see you try to avoid the ‘80’s, they suck everything in like a black hole!”
Donna uncrosses her arms and pushes off of the support she was lazing on. She reaches for the mallet and tosses it over her shoulder as soon as it’s in her hand.
“What was that for?” the Doctor squeaks.
“You’re making it worse, you dolt.” Donna grabs the Doctor’s long brown coat from the flight bench and throws it over the fire, extinguishing it in seconds. “See? Easy, you just need to stop and think.”
The Doctor blinks at his coat, groaning when he picks it up and a flurry of charred tatters falls to the floor.
“I liked that coat,” he whinges.
Donna mocks his words back to him in the poshest accent she can manage. They stare at each other for a moment, breaking into peals of laughter when they can’t hold it in any longer.
Rose smiles. It’s a bit sad, a little bittersweet. It’s still mum, but this is a part of her that she doesn’t show all that often. She loves seeing her this happy and carefree.
Sometimes it feels like she’s walking in memories. They never see her, never hear her. Their adventures aren’t easy, but they’re awesome in the most literal sense of the word.
They climb mountains of glass and they swim in seas of liquid gold. They dip through nebulas and pull trails of stardust as they fly away. Bells follow them as they tear across the stars, never slowing down and never, ever, stopping.
Rose thinks the universe could bow before them, but it’s a devotion they don’t ask for. They laugh, and they cry, and they dabble in trials of emotional extremes just to turn around and do it all over again.
Something is different tonight. There’s a certain sharpness to the air, something that doesn’t feel threatening but doesn’t quite seem safe. A change, maybe, one that hasn’t happened yet but creeps closer with every moment.
The Doctor looks at her. It’s happened before, the strange coincidence of his eyes falling where she stands, but on this insignificant night in November, he sees her.
He sobers and spins Donna towards Rose. “Did you just see that?”
“See what?” Donna asks.
“I could’ve sworn…” He marches forward and stops right in front of Rose. She wonders what would happen if they touched, if his hand would pass through or if it would finally meet her. “Huh. Guess not.”
Donna peers over his shoulder and shrugs. “I don’t see anything, you sure you’re feeling alright?”
“Yeah, ‘course,” the Doctor says reflexively. Donna clearly doesn’t believe him. Rose doesn’t either.
“Why don’t we have a—”
“There!” the Doctor shouts. His hand is close, too close, and Rose trembles as his finger pushes into her shoulder.
He blinks. He blinks again, rubbing his eyes with his free hand and scrutinising the empty air in front of him.
“Doctor, what do you see?” Donna asks.
“It’s like…” He trails off in a daze, following the line of Rose’s arm down and grabbing her hand when he reaches it. “It’s like there’s a person, but…”
“There’s no one there.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “There isn’t.”
His hand is cold around Rose’s. Her palm is clammy with rising agitation, thrown by being tugged so off-script.
“Doctor?” she says, voice shaky and soft. “Mum?”
They don’t hear her, but her breath tickles through the Doctor’s hair. Donna sees the movement and gasps.
“Oh…oh, there’s—”
“I know,” he murmurs. He twines his fingers through Donna’s, both of the Noble girls held in his grasp. Something like a spark passes through them, a prickle of electricity fed through their hands and hearts. “Don’t be scared,” he says to Donna, or maybe to Rose, but it’s an unnecessary comfort.
Something has settled into position, a cosmic lineup of the right place and the right time and the wrong reason. Their eyes glow gold, a shimmer of light in the air around them.
“DoctorDonna,” says Rose. She doesn’t know why.
“Rose,” Donna breathes.
Rose wakes up. It’s early in the morning but late enough that there’s no point in trying to fall back asleep. Mum is rifling through the cabinets downstairs, a ritual that follows their restless nights. Whenever Rose rises from her dreams, mum is already in the kitchen making tea.
It’s a link, a join between the two that neither understands. Rose tiptoes down the stairs to meet her, and there’s a steaming mug sitting in front of her place at the table. They pass the hours before Rose has to go to school in quiet conversation, avoiding the unknowns they can’t quite remember but refuse to acknowledge all the same.
Rose attends her lessons, stumbles through her day. Five p.m., winter’s midnight, finds her shopping with mum. She needs eyes for her toys, she’s running low. They split up so mum can pick up a tall stack of packages and Rose can flit around the shops.
There’s a man talking to mum when Rose finds her again. He’s tall and thin, a marker that would land him firmly at the top of gran’s ‘no entry’ list. She recognises him but she doesn’t, until…there. In his eyes.
It’s grief. The same one that mum wears, and that gran wears too.