Cold Feet

[preserved_ginger]

Title: Cold Feet
Author: rjrog77
Rating: PG-13
Beta(s): The ever-faithful requialexa
Character(s): Ten. Rose (off-camera).
Pairing(s): Ten/Rose
Disclaimer: Not Mine
Spoilers: Dialogue spoilers for 1X13 and 2X13.
A/N: More Doomsday, I’m afraid. This follows on immediately from the end of Starting Over.
Summary: He can't do this.

He can't do this.  He thought he could, but he can't.

“Coward, every time.”

It sickens him to admit it. After what he's done to get himself here - after the fraught (failed) attempts at getting himself through that Void and back to Rose, after the crippling depression. (Not to mention the killing of several aliens - he'd called them belligerent, but given his state of mind when it happened it was much more likely that their only real crime was being unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time).

He simply cannot bear the thought of standing here, alone in the TARDIS, to tell the woman he adores that there's no chance they'll ever see each other again. He’d be unable to do anything but watch, when all he wants is to hold her in his arms again. The memory of her weight in his arms is already starting to fade - and he dreads the time, which he knows will come, when he forgets the feel of it completely.

He swore to her after the Krillitane incident that he would never leave her behind, had promised that she could spend the rest of her life with him if she chose. That had been for purely selfish reasons - although he was already in love with her by that stage, he had known even then that he needed her too much ever to be able to let her go. He would have promised her the moon on a stick back then if she'd asked for it, so long as she'd stayed with him.

He had needed her so badly then - and needed her even more now. How could he do this and destroy any hope that he might one day manage some kind of miracle and do the impossible?

He couldn't do it.

Wouldn't.

And yet he knows her well enough to suspect she’ll not easily believe his “it’s impossible.”

In the end his longing for her is too strong, the allure of seeing her face again too great, for him to resist for long. And he persuades himself to do it by telling himself that he both can and will give the love of his life a proper good-bye, no matter how much it hurts him. (And he knows just how much it's going to hurt him.)

But Rose - his Rose, the girl who even now still haunts his dreams - deserves nothing less.

Therefore, as a means to an end, he finds himself opening up a channel that he's denied himself for such a long time it’s almost painful to begin it again. He focusses his mind on hers, sending soothing thoughts its way to calm it. And then he begins to whisper down their link, directly into her mind:

“Rose …”