In My End Is Her Beginning
Jul. 6th, 2008 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
preserved_gingerCharacter(s): Ten. Rose.
Pairing: The same as always.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Sadly, not mine.
A/N: The title, and the text of the cut, are both from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Other than from 4X13, I’ve borrowed dialogue from Family of Blood and Doomsday, and a line from Do I Have To Say The Words? by Bryan Adams. A sequel, of sorts, to Rosa Sine Spina.
Spoilers: Spoilerific for 4X13
Summary: We could start again. I’d like that, you and me.
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
I need you, just as much. More. Make me stop, Rose. Please. Make me stop.
“All right,” she says, and he hates himself for making her do this. ”Both of you, answer me this. When I last stood on this beach – on the worst day of my life – what was the last thing you said to me?”
She looks directly at him and, knowing what he must do in order to keep her safe – didn’t he promise Jackie he would always do that if he could, after all? – he can barely look at her. He cannot bear to leave her, when he knows that this time he’ll not ever see her again, but this is torture.
“Go on,” she urges, still looking at him.
“I said: ‘Rose Tyler’.” The words are wrung from him like water from a flannel and it’s all he can do to stand there. But he will give her this, he owes her this much. And more besides.
The way this feels, Rose Tyler, you might yet be the death of me a second time.
She doesn’t seem to like that answer. Unsurprising, really. If it were him on the receiving end of it, he doubts he’d like it any better.
We could start again. I’d like that, you and me. We could try, at least. Because everything that man there is, I’m capable of that, too.
And then she speaks again, and it’s as if no-one else exists for him.
“Yeah. And how was that sentence gonna end?”
“Does it need saying?”
Must I prove to you how good we are together? Do I actually have to say the words, for you to believe them?
Without another word, she turns to the other him, the human him, the one wearing that blue suit he’s never liked.
“And you, Doctor? What was the end of that sentence?”
He sees his alter-ego lean towards her, and whisper the words in her ear that he’d always known she’d needed to hear but had never been brave enough to say. He thinks he is ready to handle what’s coming next.
He’s wrong.
I never thought to think it would be possible to be jealous of myself.
He’s dreamed of her for so long now, has ached to take up again where they left off, and he can’t. He has to stand there and watch her kissing a man who is him – and a complete stranger, both at once – and watch him kissing her back with all the love and passion that he has for this woman in front of him (for everything his Doppelgänger possesses is only by virtue of the fact that he thought and felt – thinks, feels – it first).
Nothing – nothing at all, ever – has prepared him for the level of pain this has brought him, worse in its way than the Time War ever was. For whilst he had a love-hate relationship with his people (some he loved, some he hated), he has never felt anything but love for Rose. He loves her. Is in love with her. And the memory of it, the one thing that has kept him even halfway sane since he lost her, is the one (the only) thing that he knows he’ll always have.
If it’s the last chance I have to say it: Rose Tyler, I —
It will have to be enough.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-06 10:54 am (UTC)It will have to be enough. made me wail almost as much as Does it need saying? so - kudos. Although I may be dying a little inside because of this show and all the beautiful fic. D:
You're fantastic, though; this was a treat to read in the way it was written, even if it slaughtered me. ;)