preserved_ginger

Title: The Better Deal
Rating: PG
Character(s): Joan Redfern
Pairing: Joan/Smith (implied Doctor/Rose)
Spoilers: The Human Nature two-parter from Season Three.
Summary: It’s not in her nature to ignore the things she does not like.

“This character, Rose, I call her, Rose.”

All she has is the journal, now, and her memories. Whimsical fancies of what might have been but never was. A little like John Smith, in a way. But she refuses to tolerate that thought, because what does that make her, the woman who had loved him?

She would ask herself if it were possible to love somebody who didn’t really exist, but what would be the point of that when she already knows the answer? Of course it’s possible. She’s done it. She just doesn’t like having to acknowledge it, as it doesn’t make the truth any more palatable.

The fact she was – is – in love with somebody who all the time was in love with somebody else is something else she doesn’t enjoy acknowledging, but still she does because it’s not in her nature to ignore the things she does not like. She wonders if that part of her character is what prompted him to ask her to travel with him after he reverted to whom he truly was, although even as she wonders she acknowledges that she’ll never know the answer.

One of her most treasured memories is of the waltz she and John had shared just before everything had gone so badly wrong; but having read the journal – which, as she knows now, had never really been John but more the Doctor, bleeding through – she realises that even that wasn’t real.

If she didn’t pity him so much, she’d hate him. But she cannot but pity him – because it is perfectly obvious that, although he loves Rose enough for her name to be the only one he remembered, Rose is also long gone. She remembers enough of the white-hot agony she’d endured after Edmund’s death at Ladysmith to have an inkling of what life must be like for the Doctor, and she shivers.

She suspects the Doctor will hold that pain with him for more years than she has left to live, and the realisation tempers the last of the bitterness.

Of the two of them, she has by far the better deal.

“Seems to disappear later on…”