Six days after the Doctor left them on the beach, this Doctor stops talking. 

At first, Rose thinks it’s some kind of delayed, and very ironic, genetic transfer hangover.  She even laughs and gives him an affectionate pinch.  She waits for him to open his mouth in outrage, flap his hands and bounce round the room, gesticulating in indignation at being robbed of his ability to rant and blither for the few minutes it takes for his new body to reboot itself and then, voice returned, spout incessant babble for the next three hours to make up for his momentary silence while they laugh and tease each other and eat the chips Pete’s picked up for them.  She waits for half an hour.  He never moves. 

And that’s how it starts.  Or rather how it stops.

His smiles last a little longer, cracked out when Rose – like a mother trying to coax laughter out of her toddler – over exaggerates an eye roll at one of Jackie’s random diatribes, but they are weak shadows of the wild grin she loves, and they grow dimmer every day. 

She ignores it for as long as possible, the increasing time it takes for him to acknowledge her presence, the way he no longer notices if Tony changes the TV channel halfway through a programme their supposedly watching, the shattered mirrors in the bathroom and the bedroom.  She ignores it until it’s all that’s left, hooded eyes staring fixedly at a point in mid air, a mouth that never moves, and fingers that won’t clasp hers when she tries to hold his hand. 

He’s like a machine stripped to it’s core, automatic, functional, washing when Rose pushes him to the bathroom, eating when she shoves a fork in his hand and a plate under his nose, but with no sign of personality, no spark of his incomparable originality. 

Understanding takes a while, figuring out why life is draining from this Doctor, this irrepressibly vibrant man who spun into her life and rearranged the universe in her name, why all that’s left of this infuriatingly brilliant, beautiful soul is an empty shell.

It’s a Tuesday morning when the memory of Davros forces its way past the barriers and into the forefront of Rose’s mind.  Behold your children of time transformed into murderers.  She carefully places the steaming mug on the top of the banister, her fingers suddenly numb.  How many more, just think, how many more have died in your name? 

Too slowly, Rose looks through her bedroom doorway at this Doctor, sitting on the edge of her bed, shirtless, blank, desolate, arms lifeless at his sides, bare feet that have marked their prints on the whole of history finally chained to one lone rock, and it’s the first time she really recognises him.  Not his hair, or his mouth, or his hands, not the physical features replicated by a twist of genetics and technology that was never meant to happen, she recognises those broken, haunted eyes.  They’re the eyes she saw when he brandished a gun at the last Dalek and told her to get out the way, they’re the eyes that scorched and crackled whenever a species they encountered uttered the name of Gallifray, they’re the eyes she watched die on the Crucible when the Doctor was powerless to counter the cold facts, powerless to deny a lifetime of choosing between extermination and genocide, between death and death. 

Rose sinks to the floor, unable to look away, unable to go any closer.  This Doctor doesn’t need the creator of monsters to make him see himself, and how is she supposed to save him from his own mind. 

 It’s his stillness that’s worse than his lack of sound, which is strange, because Rose always thought the Doctor’s, this Doctor’s, any Doctor’s, voice was their trademark.  Their roaring, whispering, exhilarating, hopeful, vengeful, evocative voice, a voice strong enough to penetrate an inter-dimensional rift, a voice strong enough to dominate her thoughts everyday since she took his hand at nineteen years old and answered his invitation to run. 

Yes, she misses her name falling from his lips, the rollercoaster of their conversational sparring.  She knows this Doctor is capable of it, of the Doctor’s tone, intonation, exuberance.  He talked non-stop on the way home from Norway, though the syllables were tinged with a desperation that Rose didn’t remember.  But his voice is not what she wishes for.

She wishes for the familiar waggle of his eyebrows, for him to shove his hands in his pockets and pace round the kitchen.  Most of all, Rose dreams, wishes, waits, for him to reach for her hand.

But he just sits there.  Staring.  Mouth closed.  Fists clenched. 

Rose wonders, as she watches him through the patio doors, slumped in the iron chair on the lawn, not noticing one of the cats walking across his lap, how Donna is coping, wonders whether the other combination of two beings that were never designed to unite is as paralysed as this Doctor. 

He’s still this Doctor.  Rose doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to call him the Doctor. 

His suit hangs unworn in her wardrobe.  He wears whatever Rose lays out on the bed.  This Doctor wears jeans and t-shirts.  They’re becoming too loose on him.  This Doctor doesn’t eat chips. 

For a while, Rose has one-sided conversations with him, leaving time for the answers he doesn’t give.  She repeats chores she’s already completed, whatever she can do to keep herself busy in the kitchen or the living room or wherever the chair is that he’s collapsed into that day, unable to stand any longer.  She keeps her tone bright and bouncy, works in old jokes but omits anything that alludes too directly to the old world they’re cut off from, and tells herself he just needs time.  He doesn’t respond, doesn’t look at her, doesn’t hardly blink, and as days turn to weeks, and the pretence of normality turns from comforting to suffocating, her limbs start to shake when she bemoans that Big Brother wasn’t one of the casualties of the parallel shift, her tears begin to burn as she repeats something Tony said earlier which sounded funny at the time, and after two months of no replies, of screaming silence, Rose’s words fall away.  Her own voice dies. 

On that day he’s sitting at the kitchen table, black t-shirt emphasising his pale skin and seemingly bruised eyes, vacantly staring at the occasionally dripping tap.  She tries to tell him that Jackie’s bought chops for dinner, and that Tony drew him a picture at playschool, but a scream erupts instead, a barrage of anguished shrieks, desperate and piercing.  They grow louder, sharper, when he makes no response, not even an instinctive jolt of shock. 

Rose screams out every rational and irrational emotion she’s managed to keep lidded since she was left with this man that she loves but can’t reach.  She glares at the ceiling, gaze burning through the plaster, through the roof, out into the clouded sky and the barren blackness beyond, and bellows so loudly she hopes her question permeates through the rift, through the universe and through those blue, wooden walls.  “Did you know this was going to happen?!”

Her hysterical cries are punctuated by the crashes of crockery and cutlery flung against the wall, the ceiling, the floor.  Through the furious tears she watches a stray shard of shattering glass catch on his bare arm before it falls to the ground.  A thin line of blood rises like lava.  It stoppers her screams, the deadly red glowing bright in this room of white and blue, and his one heartbeat, his lonely heartbeat, the steady thud that is deafening in its mortality, throbs through the echoing silence.  She flies to him, cradles his head and sobs apologies into his hair.  Her lips find his face, force frantic kisses on his jaw, his nose, his forehead.  She begs, out loud and in her head, begs for him to come back to her, to not leave her here alone like this.  This Doctor doesn’t pull away.  This Doctor doesn’t kiss her back.  This Doctor watches his blood drip onto the table top. 

There are no more outbursts, but there are no more words either.  Rose used to think the world could change with the right word at the right time – Run, Bad Wolf, Does it really need saying – but no string of letters can erase the past.  Not now.  So she sits silently beside him, or hovers behind his shoulder, runs a hand through the brown hair she styles for him in the morning because she cannot bear how young he looks if it’s left to it’s own devices, strokes his fingers and wraps her arms around his torso.  She tries to affirm her presence through touch, hopes that skin can cut through his nightmares in a way words cannot. 

She refills his mug every few hours; a routine she clings to though the liquid always remains untouched.  She no longer bothers to quieten the sobs when they sit alone in the gloom of twilight, mute and unmoving in a house that’s never going to be a home, a steaming mug placed between them.

A good cup of tea isn’t going to work this time. 

Summer turns to autumn and cool breezes begin flowing off the Thames.  Days become blanketed by atmospheric shrouds, bleak and heavy, morphing from grey to black and to grey again, an endless cycle of shades that sunlight can’t seem to penetrate. 

This Doctor likes to sit outside.  At least Rose concludes he does.  There is no outer sign that he notices the difference between sitting on the sofa or out on the iron patio furniture, but he generally gravitates to the garden in the mornings once Rose has shoved a piece of toast in his hand and he’s nibbled one corner.  The wind ruffles his hair and gives him goose bumps.  He comes in when it rains because Rose takes his arm and gently urges him back to the house.  She buys him a fleece.  The long, brown coat she spent an hour staring at, remembering how similar material used to flap against her legs when they ran together, remembering how it used to billow when he’d bounce round the TARDIS, animated, inspired, and so, so alive, remains in the shop window.

Rose stops going into work.  Though Jackie shows a patience Rose didn’t know she possessed, caring for this Doctor as one of the family with no prompting from her daughter - “please, sweetheart, just tells us what’s wrong” - Rose likes to believe he feels better when she’s near. 

Her dad works late in his Torchwood office and comes home exhausted, laden with folders and technical drawings and a laptop full of encoded files.  He’s got a scheme, a plan he thinks will fix everything.  Rose has learnt to recognise the look.  She’s also learnt to recognise the look when a plan isn’t working, and she sees it everyday now, in the apologetic glance Pete shoots this Doctor when he thinks Rose isn’t looking. 

They go for drives sometimes, away from London and out into the countryside.  Mickey tricked out a Beatle for Rose’s twenty-first birthday in a vain attempt to reconnect.  She gave the expected grateful hugs and promises of road trips, but progress at Torchwood meant eternal postponements and now he’s gone forever.  Rose thinks of him sometimes when, between tuning the radio and clicking the windscreen wipers, she flicks glances at this Doctor, head lolling against the headrest, blind to the turning leaves and acres of empty fields, thinks she finally understands how her oldest friend must have felt when she was too distracted by the Doctor to see him. 

One rainy morning in October, Rose finds this Doctor sitting on the bottom step of the main staircase, propped against the banister.  She spies red drops on the rug.  She sees him cradling his left hand, his left wrist.  Instantly alert, instantly terrified, Rose drops to her knees in front of him.  There’s a too long second when all she can think of are razor blades but then she sees the blood is running from grazed knuckles, and can draw in a sigh of damp air. 

She reaches up to run a hand across his face, trace a finger along his jaw, convey that it’s ok, that this is something she can fix.  Her hand doesn’t reach his skin.  It hovers, frozen, like the breath suddenly caught in her throat.  He’s looking at her.  Not past her, not through her, but at her, holding her gaze.  She daren’t swallow, or blink.  Her hand starts to shake but she furiously holds it taught.  His eyes are wide, wider than she’s seen them in three months, water pooling at the corners, and he’s here, right in front of her, inches away, he’s finally here.  The lonely little boy, the wise old man, the wild adventurer, the compassionate friend, every fibre of the Oncoming Storm is staring out at her, reaching for her, battling through the flames and the screams and the billions of burning bodies. 

Posture rigid, shoulders squared, there’s purpose pouring out of his muscles, fierce intent rather than the limp nothingness that’s blanketed him since his mouth closed for the last time, and it’s vibrating the air round them.  His head quivers. Two tears slalom down his burning cheeks.  Rose’s eyes sting, but she won’t let them close, not now, now that his lips are parting, now that his fingers are twitching, now that this Doctor, the Doctor, her Doctor, is ripping himself apart to get back to her, to get free. 

She edges forward slowly, steady, progress almost unnoticeable, until she is crouching between his legs, hands hovering over his trembling fingers, her own lips starting to quiver, words of encouragement, and comfort, and gratitude bubbling in her throat.  The inklings of a smile pull on her mouth but she won’t let it flair, not yet.  She wants to help him, to somehow ease the pain.  He’s so close now.  If it’s my last chance to say it, Rose Tyler…

His eyebrows rise, his pupils blow wide as a black hole, his breath hitches.  The strain is so painful to witness it is almost unbearable.  The veil is lifting, the chains are breaking.   His stare is locked on her, like she’s an anchor, a beacon, his only respite, his only chance, and she half believes she can see the inferno steadily incinerating his mind, can see the sparks in the black of his watering eyes.  Rose counts the seconds, and watches, and waits, and silently begs. 

Her brother’s wail explodes through the ceiling.  Instinct and routine abduct Rose’s attention.  Her head snaps up, her eyes snap shut.  It’s a millisecond, infinitesimal in theory but immeasurable in effect for when she looks back, screaming wordless apologies, hoping, wishing, pleading, it’s Bad Wolf Bay all over again, and he’s slumped, and muted, and gone. 

Rose doesn’t remember a lot of the rest of that day, just glimpses of Jackie bandaging the Doctor’s hand, cooing reassurances that are slightly off pitch and interrupted by sniffing and of her dad sweeping the remnants of the living room mirror into a bin liner.  Everything else is eclipsed by the increasing self hatred every second she realises that he was reaching for her hand, and she had pulled her fingers away.

Four months after Norway, one month after she lost him again, Rose is heading along the first floor landing, an extra blanket for this Doctor clasped under one arm, when she hears her parent’s pained whispers.

It’s after midnight, and the only light is drifting in from the security lamps on the driveway and the too bright full moon.  Rose hovers in the shadows outside Tony’s room, just able to make out the lump of her little brother’s sleeping body under his quilt, and the outlines of her parents huddled by the window.

“That’s not what I’m saying, Pete, I know it’s not his fault.  But…why?  Why’s he like this?” 

It’s mid November and the heating hasn’t come on (Jackie insists on setting the thermostat despite the five times she’s broken it).  Rose won’t let them light fires in the grates because this Doctor is never going to have to see real flames again. The house is chilled by darkness and frost, but it’s not the temperature that is making Rose shiver. 

Her father stays mercifully silent for so long that Rose thinks the answer might not come, the hideous answer she’s refused to acknowledge, but then he sighs, long and deep, and she squeezes her eyes shut, wishing her ears had such protective barriers.

“I don’t think Timelords feel like we do, sweetheart, but he’s half human now.”  Tears squeeze out from Rose’s clenched eyes; her chest predicts the impact of the knock out punch her father is setting to deliver.  “Nine hundred years of God knows what, Jacks,” he sighs again, defeated, deadpan, drained.  “Don’t reckon post traumatic stress quite covers it.”

Iron.  Rust.  Rose’s gums are bleeding, her teeth gritting too hard.  She watches her dad put an arm round her mum, melding them into one person, a black imprint in the moon’s light.  She turns away, stares down the hallway at her half open bedroom door and tries to swallow down the swilling blood.

She’s built the past months around the mundane, making sure he eats, keeping his hair under control, pushing a toothbrush into his hand, washing his clothes.  Her parents have tiptoed round the unfolding reality, all furtive looks but never a direct question.  Jackie keeps up the pretence that everything is normal, waffling on about which cereal this Doctor prefers and asking if he needs more hair gel.  Pete corrals Tony when the three year old tries to get the silent stranger, who grinned so broadly when they first met, to play.

The Tylers have been as silent as this Doctor about the cause of the breakdown, opted for reaction rather than explanation or, more terrifyingly, prediction, and it’s allowed Rose to steer her mind away from the glaringly obvious, from what is slowly crushing this Doctor, from all that his half-human heart, his only heart, must be trying to process, all that Rose only ever got hints of when the Doctor’s eyes clouded and the past threatened to drown him. 

She listens to her parent’s words repeating in her mind, their ugly, raw words, and wants to run away, to thunder down the stairs, fly out the house and keep going, never look back, never stop.  She stares at her white, blank door.  She knows what happens when you stop. 

His system is overloading from the pressure, from the memories and the experiences that a Timelord can detach and compartmentalise but a human’s mind, a human’s conscience, a human’s heart, can’t separate or turn off.   All the people who have died for this Doctor, for the Doctor, for them both, all those who have died in spite of them, all those who have died because of them; how is a human supposed to live with such responsibility?  The blood burns in Rose’s throat.  A human isn’t supposed to live with such responsibility.  The moonlight lapping at her feet feels like ice.  A human can’t live with such responsibility. 

The carpet muffles her footfalls as she flees to her bedroom.  Her sobs bounce off the paintwork. 

A rainstorm hit earlier in the day, flooding the car park of the local OCSET and trapping Rose in the supermarket for an extra half an hour.  When she had finally made it home she’d found him standing in the driveway, saturated, freezing, thin t-shirt plastered to his body, ribs visible through the clinging fabric, head upturned to the sky, water pounding onto his face.  She’d forced him into a blistering hot shower, wrapped him in blankets and duvets and fed him soup, but there was an unmistakeable wheeze in his breathing, and as she pads over to her bed and gently drapes another blanket over his body, her tears dripping on to the checked wool, he’s noticeably shivering. 

“We’ll take him into the base tomorrow, get the docs to take a look at him.” Rose had nodded at her dad’s suggestion as she’d towel dried this Doctor’s hair.  Pete had left the bathroom and whispered the last part to his wife.  Rose wishes she hadn’t heard it.  “We can’t let him get sick, Jacks.  He’s got no fight in him.” 

Rose slips off her jeans and sinks onto the bed next to this Doctor, just as she does every night when, like an unplugged Cyberman, he trudges through the house, drifting to the room where he hugged Rose for the last time, tight and desperate and terrified, gripped her so hard she could barely breath enough to confusedly whisper over and over that it was going to be ok, that she was here.  At the time she hadn’t realised what it was that was finally, finally hitting him. 

Together they ran through time, from planet to galaxy, galaxy to universe, skipped across seasons and generations and eons, and Rose never considered that they weren’t running to something, never wondered why the Doctor wouldn’t glance over his shoulder, never once contemplated what would happen when he stopped.

The Doctor, the man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame.  Davros’s words run on an endless loop; the enemy who knew her Doctor better than she did. 

This Doctor doesn’t run.  There’s no point.  A Timelord’s life felt by a human heart.  It’s the ultimate inescapable prison. 

Moonlight filters through the half open curtains behind them, painting a streak of white across their bodies.  Rose watched this Doctor move the bed so the headboard faces away from the window.  He doesn’t look outside at night.   

Rose shuffles under his five blankets and grips his hand.  It’s clammy.  A fever’s coming.  She props herself on the pillow and strokes the first pricklings of sweat from his forehead. 

He’s in there somewhere, her Doctor, her courageous, spontaneous, irreplaceable Doctor.  Trapped by the memories his human self is forcing him to relieve again and again and again, his human conscience dissecting all that he has seen, all that he has lost, all that he has done.  Rose looks at his open eyes directed at the shadowy ceiling, fixed on horrors she cannot see and images she cannot erase, and presses a kiss, gentle, trembling, devoted, to his lips.  She has to believe he is in there, that he will find a way through the fire, that he will find a way back.  She will be here when he does.

Sleep, like peace, has abandoned Rose, she just dozes in fits and starts, trying not to listen for the distant whir and rustle of twirling leaves.  Tonight her eyes stay wide and exhaustion stays away.  She hold his unresponsive hand in both of hers, presses until she feels the cold beat of his one pulse, and looks back out through the glass to the distant stars. 

Rose has never prayed before.  She does now. 

Next Part

NB// I know this is a pretty bleak scenario, but there’s a song I imagined Rose listening to when she was beginning to loose hope, a song she’d put on her stereo when, like in the last scene, she would lie at night beside this Doctor, holding his hand and waiting for his fingers to finally close round hers.  It’s called Fragile by Poets of the Fall.

‘Cause the love you used to feel’s still there inside,

It may be a faded photograph but I know you care, so don’t hide it,

You’re scared I’m here beside you, if you get lost I’m here to guide you,

And I’ll give you peace when peace is fragile. 

Love is all the good in you, love is peace when peace is fragile.