preserved_ginger

Title: Put Your Shoes At The Door
Author: The Bitter Rose /

lived_in_hope
Character(s): Ten. Rose. Mention of Ten II.
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: 12
A/N: This was originally a first-person Rose POV piece examining how she might have felt during and just after the events of Journey’s End, but I thought it worked better as a third-person narrative. Hopefully I wasn’t wrong. The title, and the quotes at the beginning and end of the fic, are from Rhapsody on a Windy Night by T. S. Eliot.
Disclaimer: Not mine
Spoilers: Journey’s End.
Summary: She’d said she’d never leave him.

Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.

He’d made her think she was special, that she was different. He’d told her that she could spend the rest of her life with him, and then had heavily implied that he would never leave her.

And then what had he done, first chance he’d had after she had spent all that time trying to find a way back to him that didn’t involve bringing down two universes? He’d taken her straight back to that same universe she’d tried so hard to escape and had left her there with a clone of him.

The clone had looked like him, talked like him – but the woman he’d left behind knew as well as he did that he wasn’t him, or not in the way that mattered.

She’d thought they were — well, he’d have known what she’d thought they were, because that’s what they had been. And that they weren’t that any more, or ever would be again, made her angry in some ways – because even if he’d stopped loving her, she hadn’t stopped loving him – and terribly sad for him in others.

Because even if he’d never managed to say those words to her – she’d known.

“My Doctor.”

She’d always known.

The last twist of the knife.