preserved_ginger

Title: A Heartsbeat in Time (1/?)
Rating: PG
Character(s): Ten, Rose, Ten II
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Spoilers: Spoilers for Journey’s End and minor ones for the Sontaran two-parter.
Notes: Yes, this is AU Journey’s End Ten/Rose. No, I don’t care about canon.
Summary: They’re all three on that beach, that accursed beach that he’s never wanted to see again in this or any other lifetime.

They’re all three on that beach, that accursed beach that he’s never wanted to see again in this or any other lifetime. He’s planning to give her up, to save her from being destroyed through the hands of his (many) enemies and give her a fighting chance at having a fantastic life. It’s because he loves her so much that he’s willing to do it: her happiness has always meant more than his own.

It’s killing him to leave her, to throw away the last chance he’ll ever have to love her, but it’s going well – as well as it can – so far. Or so he’d thought. And now she’s just stood there and asked him to complete the sentence he started when his projected image stood here so long ago. And he knows – because he’s counted, lived through, each fraction of a yoctosecond of it – just how very long that’s been.

“Does it need saying?”

Oh Rose, my Rose. Do I have to tell you? Don’t you already know?

She just looks at him, after he says that. He’s put every ounce of meaning in his tone and facial expression that are possible – but he won’t say those three words to her because he is trying to make this as pain-free for everybody as he can.

The words are nevertheless bursting to be said and he has to swallow them whole; their taste is surprisingly bitter.

It isn’t until she turns away from him towards his double – a man who is looking at him with a kind of disbelieving pity: I can’t believe you’re doing this is written plainly on his face – that something breaks inside of him and he cries out in protest.

“No!”

Rose stops dead in the middle of her next sentence. He’s almost certain that she’s about to ask the other him what the end of that sentence would have been. He’s more than certain that his duplicate is prepared to tell her, and he knows he won’t be able to bear the result.

Her attention is fully on him again, he can feel it. Every part of him is concentrated fully on her: he can’t help it, that’s how it’s been ever since he’s worn this face, a face that was born for her. His senses are full of her, this little pink-and-yellow human who looks so different to, but essentially the same as, the woman who’d taken his hearts with him when she’d left him.

He’s been thinking that it would be selfish of him to want to keep her, which has a good deal to do with why the three of them are standing here in the cold wind – there’s something about this place, he thinks; he has a feeling it was probably almost as cold as this the last time Rose was on this beach. And, in some other time and place, this wanting to keep her with him would be the selfish thing to do. But he is gradually starting to comprehend the idea that maybe, in this case, the selfish thing would be to leave her behind.

Yes, she would have been with the other him.

But the one thing that’s stayed with him from dealing with the Sontarans, and the cloned Martha, is that a person could be the same as another person – down to thoughts and feelings and fingerprints and DNA – yet still be an entirely different person. In that respect, his other self is no more the man Rose lost than he is his other self. Confusing, even to a Time Lord brain, but true none-the-less.

All these thoughts and more go rushing through his head in a heartsbeat of time.

And then Rose speaks, and he’s lost. How he ever thought he’d manage to do this is quite, quite beyond him.

“Doctor?”