Title:  I Thought it Would Last Forever
Author:  JeopardyFriendly
Characters/Pairings:  Rose Tyler, Eighth Doctor, flashbacks to Nine, Ten, Ten2
Genre:  Action/adventure, angst, fluff, romance (in flashbacks)
Rating:  PG-13
Betas:  amberfocus , amyo67   
Summary:  After several weeks of grieving the death of her husband, the human/Time Lord version of the Doctor, an immortal Rose decides to get her act together and return to the land of the living.  On her way out the door she runs into a familiar stranger.

A/N:  This is my first Doctor Who fanfiction.  I hope you like it.

Chapter One:  Life Goes On

 

 

It’s one of those words, you know? One of those words that people say, but that they don’t really understand. Forever. It gives us a vague concept of time never running out, of love never fading away, of just this moment, this most important moment, going on and on and on. I swore that I would stay with him forever and I think he even fooled himself into believing it was true. I know I did. I promised him that day on the beach, not for the first time, but for what I hoped would be the last, that I was never going to leave him. And in the end, I kept my promise.   We just didn’t understand then that he would be the one to leave me first, that he would have to.

 

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be just going on. I was used to losing people by then. Pete had gone 30 years ago, followed shortly by Mum. Tony had died a decade ago, his wife passing two years later. I’d gotten used to losing people and after the first searing, mind-numbing pain of watching the Doctor die in my arms, after six weeks in a dark room refusing to see any of my nieces and nephews or my surviving brother Daniel, I was able to close off a part of my mind, compartmentalize his death and only allow my grief to slip through the cracks on occasion. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to do such a thing, but I hoped it would be the last.

 

We had never had children. His DNA was still too different from mine, half human wasn’t close enough, and no number of specialists had been able to change that. I had nothing to distract me, none of the grandchildren or great grandchildren that people my age would normally have, though no one would have suspected me of being a grandmother even if we’d had them. I hadn’t aged normally in 62 years, not since I’d been shot at age 30 and we found out I was like Jack. Most days were bearable since he died. None of them were good.

 

I had the TARDIS, of course, and the Doctor had made sure I knew how to pilot her right from the start. He’d bonded her to me when she was still the size of my fist, so it wasn’t like I was stranded on Earth or anything, but I hadn’t had the heart to fly her since he’d died. I wasn’t sure I ever would again. Time and Space were things we’d done together. I didn’t know if I could ever face doing them without him.

 

I was glad, then, six weeks later of the distraction when Torchwood called me and said the world was coming to an end and they needed me. I’d retired years before, but no one had had the specialized knowledge of either the Doctor or myself and we’d both worked in the capacity of consultants once or twice a year. For them to call me so soon after his death, I knew it had to be serious. With Torchwood, the end of the world could be anything from a Sirian hitchhiker to a full out Blenius attack, and it was hard to know at times who to take seriously.   But this call came from Miles Jackson and I had known and trusted his judgment for over 40 years.

 

I’d asked if it could wait a day and he’d said yes, but no longer. I knew I’d need that long just to pull myself together, and if I was truthful with myself, it was well past time I got myself pointed back in the direction of normal. Or Torchwood normal, which was not quite the same thing. I had gotten rather lax about taking care of myself and I knew I couldn’t go in there looking like my current disheveled self so I scheduled a day of self-maintenance. The Tyler name and the Tyler money still pulled a lot of weight in this town and I was able to make myself presentable with a new haircut, manicure, and clothes within hours.

 

I didn’t have time to do anything about the piles of dirty laundry around the house or the scattered remnants of half eaten take away meals, but I did finally call the cleaning service and have them resume their former schedule. I didn’t imagine they were going to be too happy at the state of my home, but that’s why they were paid the big bucks. As I surveyed how badly I’d let our – my – home go, I knew I’d be throwing a rather large tip at them, too.

 

I was pretty sure the next morning that I wouldn’t be fooling anyone with my spruced up appearance, not anyone who knew me, who knew how much my life had revolved around the Doctor and our lives together, but it was like putting on a costume. I was the Rose Tyler and now I more or less looked like her again. As I stared myself down in the mirror I wished for my old blue leather jacket, long since destroyed in a battle with the Carpathians (the aliens not the earthlings). It had been my comfort before the Doctor came to live in this universe, a reminder of the armor he used to wear when I met him; that old, battered, black leather jacket, and I would have liked it to be my comfort now. Instead I pulled on the newly purchased red lambskin one I’d gotten the day before. It would serve as armor as well as anything else.

 

I looked like me, only harder than I’d seen in decades. High blonde pony-tail that managed to still fall nearly to my waist, chipmunk cheeks that had hollowed a bit with my lack of interest in food since the Doctor’s death. I was as thin as I’d been the last time I’d been to the parallel universe. It was not a look the Doctor had enjoyed, nor was it a look I’d strived for on purpose back then. I’d worked too hard, slept too little, and never ate enough in my struggle to get back to him. He’d liked me with more curves and less angles and for as long as he’d been with me I’d kept myself rather comfortably at his ideal. Not for him as much as for myself, because I still liked my chips, but it had had the added benefit of making him very turned on to have curves he enjoyed.

 

I sighed. That part of my life was over now. I couldn’t conceive of ever taking a lover, of ever marrying another man again. He hadn’t made me promise him that I would find love again, that I would try to be happy. He had known, I think, that I wouldn’t want to and it would break my heart to promise him I would. The only person who might be able to break through my heart again was inaccessible in the parallel world and even he would have to do much to thaw the ice inside my chest. I still loved that man, too, in spite of and because of what he’d done that day on the beach. I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever forgive him for leaving me immortal with a man who was not.

 

None of that mattered though. It was time to start living my life again and today was as good a day as any. Armor in place, I pulled on my camel-colored, steel-toed boots, made sure my stun gun was in my pocket and that my actual gun was in my purse, grabbed my keys, walked out my front door and looked up into the face of a stranger who was standing on my front porch.

 

“You don’t belong here,” he said in a soft, lilting voice. “You don’t belong…anywhere.” He pulled something out of his pocket, something I’d only ever seen wielded by one man, and pointed it at me. It wasn’t quite the same and yet I’d recognize it anywhere. The soft little buzz of a sonic device filled the air as he scanned me with the long thin tube. “You’re a fixed point in time. You shouldn’t be possible.”

 

I looked him over from top to bottom. He was dressed in velvet, dark green or black, it was hard to be sure, a Robertian cut (Edward had died here in childbirth and a distant cousin had taken the throne) that fit him well enough. His eyes had a sparkle in them that I immediately recognized, they were intensely, beautifully blue and his long, auburn brown hair touched his shoulders in loosely waving curls. It had to be him. I didn’t know how and I didn’t know why and had no clue what incarnation this might be, but I’d have recognized him anywhere. I took a chance.

 

“Shouldn’t be possible is never the same as impossible. Is it, Doctor?”

Ch. 2:  http://jeprdyfrndly.livejournal.com/2306.html