The One Who Came After

[preserved_ginger]

Title: The One Who Came After
Characters: Ten. Rose (off-camera). Martha.
Setting: Season Three
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: PG-13
Beta(s): sensiblecat saw this in its early stages, and requialexa has also done a brilliant job with it.
Disclaimer: Not mine (sadly).
Spoilers: So long as you know who the companion was in Season Three, you’re fine.
A/N: Angst again, ’m afraid.
Summary: “Not that you’re replacing her.”

“Not that you’re replacing her.”

That was one of the first things Martha ever heard from you - that you had a “friend” named Rose, that you had been “together” (which implied that Rose was far more to you than just a “friend”, as well you knew; then again, you intended, to a certain degree, to mislead). That much, fine. She needed to know that she was not the first ever to travel with you (you learned that much at least from the incident with Rose and Sarah Jane), but then to imply in speaking to her that, whatever she did, she would never manage to measure up to the woman who had gone before? Not the best way to begin a working relationship. But then you never were that great at the domestics, were you?

And who, exactly, were you trying to fool when you said to her that she was never going to replace Rose? It was a thumping great lie, and you knew it then just as well as you know it now. You were trying to replace Rose, and you know it. But it’s the admitting of that fact that eats away at you. You needed to replace her because you needed someone, something else to worry about. Something else to think about, so you could force yourself to stop thinking obsessively about just how many times you had failed Rose. Not least the time she needed you most.

You see it, repeatedly, in your nightmares:

The old aching pain that is Gallifrey, superseded by a new gaping wound. The same scene replays itself over and over, and you cannot change a thing: you can only watch, a horrified spectator, as the events unfurl exactly as you remember them.

In the dream you’re back in that horrible white room and she is falling, falling into the Void; and all you can do is hold on tight to your clamp against the wall (for what would be the point of both of you falling into Hell? How could you save her if you were falling, too?) and watch her disappear.

The sound of your scream when she lost her hold on that lever will haunt you for ever.

So you were looking for a new companion to replace the old one – you do not travel well alone, after all; that’s one lesson, out of many, you’ve finally managed to learn – but you’re not, not ever, looking to replace the love you’d lost when Rose was swallowed by the parallel universe.

So nearly lost to the Void, though, was Rose; so very nearly. You would have done anything and everything, whatever ended up being necessary, to get her out of there if that had happened. Possibly even destroying two universes, those two same damn universes you could not bring yourself to risk in order to bring her back from that parallel, looking-glass, world. It’s probably as well not to dwell on that fact; it would not endear you to Rose to know that you would willingly have let countless billions of people die just to save her, no matter how much she loves you.

There is no point either, by the way, pretending to yourself or to anyone else that you would not have done it. Why? Because it is plain, for all to see, that you adore Rose and are broken by the loss of her. Even Martha can see that. Martha, who barely knows you because you will not let her know you, will not let her see anything of you except what you want her to see. Rose may be gone, but her memory’s still here – in your eyes, on your face, in every whisper of her name…

She’s smart, is Martha; but then she needs to be, if she wants to become the doctor she’s been training so hard to be. She knows when to press you on things and when to let you alone. She never asks too many questions about the times you disappear into that room (and she knows as well as you just whose room that is) for hours and come out with the look of thunder on your face and pain, beyond the telling of it, in your eyes. She is slowly learning which topics are touchy ones (most topics, then, if you’re honest with yourself) and knows never to mention her predecessor, the touchiest topic of them all. She thinks she is in love with you, of course, but that will pass in time.

You need to move on, as you well know, although you want neither to do nor accept it. But accepting it or not, it’s unavoidable – you need to move on for the sanity of those around you, since you don‘t seem to care much about your own. Move on, but not to forget. Never that. It doesn’t take much to work out that you are going to see everybody and every situation through a Rose-shaped prism for the immediate future, at least, and it is hard to blame you.

(If memory serves, you remember Rose telling you once of how long it took her before she saw your face when she looked at you rather than that of your previous incarnation. You think she was rather nervous about admitting to it, but by that time you’d fallen so far for her that it didn’t really matter what she said or did, pretty much; you’d love her regardless.)

And yet, , you are strangely reluctant to let the past alone and start living in the present. This may have something to do with the woman you picked as Rose’s replacement – for all the world, when you look at her, it’s as if you see Adeola; and all the torturous memories of that summer’s day at Torchwood, and everything that followed, come flooding back. Perhaps this is why you have found yourself leaving her to her own devices for the majority of the time, preferring to wallow as much as possible in your immediate past, in the one time in your memory that you can remember being loved unconditionally for you. Not – as so often in the past – for who your friends were, or who you had access to, or who your parents were, or what you could do.

You try very hard not to think about that, or her; every time you do you end up in that room, in Rose’s room, weeping like the heart-broken man you are. For all you’re trying to replace her, to forget what’s now past and for ever gone, some deeper part of you knows that it's a forlorn hope. That same deeper part of you refuses to believe you'll never see her again (but you've buried that so deeply that you're not sure you'll ever find it again).

There's a bit of you still that knows that who she is, and the depth of the feelings you hold for her, have burnt themselves into your psyche and will be part of you always.

She’d promised you “for ever”, once upon a time; you cling to the memory, for it’s all that’s left you, of the human child with a lifespan so very much shorter than your own. You'd never dreamed that this would be how she would achieve it, that this would be her last, priceless, gift to you. You're in love with her still, of course – head-over-heels in love with her – and utterly unwilling to let her go.