Pipe Dreams

[preserved_ginger]

Title: Pipe Dreams
Character(s): The Doctor.
Pairing: Doctor/Rose
Beta: glory_jean
Setting: Season Four, but before Turn Left
Rating: PG
Summary: He wants to change history. But he doesn’t quite dare.

He cannot take his eyes off her.

In all the years he’s known her he’s never seen her look so beautiful. He watches her with greedy eyes as she laughs and jokes with Mickey, goes shopping with Keisha or out on the tiles with Shareen.

He watches her as she blossoms from the bud into the flower. Watches as his current favourite human manages to fill his hearts with love and joy through the sheer fact she exists, the fact that she is here and he is able to feast his eyes on her to his hearts’ content.

On several occasions he’s almost broken the habit of lifetimes, has been on the verge of saying to hell with the rules and going to join Rose (who, after all, seems to be having a damn sight more fun than he is.) But so far there has always been a hand resting gently yet firmly on his shoulder – Jack, Martha or, lately, Donna.

Each time there is the unspoken reminder he doesn’t need, and the sympathetic expression full of pity he doesn’t want – and the fragile peace he’s managed to build around himself, since he finally let himself admit that he isn’t coping even now without Rose, fractures again and the whole damn thing falls apart.

She isn’t where she should be – by his side, or in his bed, or anywhere near him any more – she isn’t here and will never be again. And for a few frozen seconds his mind again flashes back to that room, where he stands with his head flush against the wall trying to figure out how to be where “being” means being in a world where she isn’t.

Yet as much as he loathes this recurring flashback, dreads it even, he welcomes it. Because every day he has a flashback is one more day he remembers her clearly, one more day as a bulwark against the time when the remembering won’t hurt him any more.

And he cannot take his eyes off her.