Roses in December: Dårlig ulv Stranden

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Title: Roses in December: Dårlig ulv Stranden
Rating: PG13
Character(s): Ten
Pairing(s): Ten/Rose
Spoilers: Up to the end of Season 3.
Disclaimer: I am borrowing what is (most definitely) not mine
Author's Notes: I decided that the best way for me to get back into writing this was to start from the beginning. This, The Doctor's journey after he loses Rose, has been completely re-written and, rather than a chaptered fic, will probably be a series of inter-linked one-shots. Feedback and concrit to help make me better are both warmly welcomed. (The title, if anyone is interested, is from a J. M. Barrie quote.)
Summary: He's utterly lost, without her.

The last of the Time Lords is an absolute emotional mess (more so than usual, in fact), and has been since Rose was trapped on the other side of the wall in that parallel universe with her mother, a man who looked like but was not her father, and Mickey. How bitter the irony that, although he won Rose from Mickey in every way that counted, he's now lost her back to him in a way that even he, brilliant mind and everything, doesn't know how to fix.

His mind and body have been screaming for her ever since, and that transmission to her in Dårlig ulv Stranden (to say good-bye – see, Rose, how different you are? I never say good-bye, but for you I burnt up a sun to do it) made it worse, in a way; more real and permanent in a way he really wasn't ready to cope with. Because he will not and cannot grieve for her (how can he, when she isn't really dead?), can't hold her, much as every sinew and nerve in his body and mind aches to (she isn't here; he can't seem to get that fact through his head, and he wonders whether it's his mind trying to protect him. If it is, it's not doing a particularly good job of it). But he can, and indeed does, still love her. With everything he has.

He has found, in the months it took between the Battle of Canary Wharf and that final, inadequate good-bye, that his mind has taken to playing nasty, vicious tricks on him. He keeps thinking, for a second or two, that it's all not true and that when he opens his eyes, or returns to the console room, or any other number of unlikely and half-demented (indeed, increasingly unhinged) bargains he has begun making with himself, she will be back as if she had never been away.

If only things were that simple.

It doesn't, obviously, work like that and when he is forced into sleep through sheer exhaustion his nightmares now reflect his new reality. Instead of the images of a long-dead people burned into the back of his eyelids, it's her. He can't – and oh, how he wishes he could – shake the last image he has of her.

Every time, it's the same dream. He's back there on that god-forsaken Norwegian beach, with her wind-whipped hair falling into her eyes (God, how he wishes he had been able to touch her). Over and over again, he sees her watching him intently, listening to him screwing up the one thing, the only thing, in their entire relationship he had needed so desperately to get right.

The dream's the same, always, always the same; he doesn't say it back, those three vitally important words. Each time he dies a little further inside. He's (almost) certain that she knows, knows how much he feels for her, but he knows that knowing is not the same as being told; he carries with him now the extra piece of guilt over the fact that he has managed, for the umpteenth time, to break her heart.

But she'd broken his, too (unintentionally, he concedes, but that is not the point); she'd promised him “for ever” and, like the loon he was, he'd taken her at her word. He'd had years with her, before Canary Wharf; years in which (once he'd stopped being a git and succumbed to the inevitable) they had been lovers. Years that the two of them spent becoming so close to each other that in some ways it was almost impossible to tell where one of them finished and the other began. He is, he's concluded, missing the other part of him; and God, how he hates it.