Just after, Rose takes this Doctor to the Powell Estate.  Or what would have been the Powell Estate in the other dimension.  She doesn’t know when she started thinking of the world where she was born as ‘other’, it just happened, time eroding away a loyalty that should have been permanent. 

It’s a factory unit on this world.  A sprawling chain of flat roofed boxes and assigned parking spaces.  Spectro is printed in crimson on the sign off the main road, bright enough to be eye catching, vague enough so she has no clue what they make.

Rose isn’t sure why she feels the urge to make a pilgrimage to a place that doesn’t exist, but she’s too tired to analyse motivation.  They find the place where she thinks the sorry excuse for a park would have sat, the square of crushed grass and dirt where the Doctor played his Ghostbusters routine, where she swung on his hand as they sauntered to her block with no inkling of the fate they were walking straight into.  She tries to smile.  She imagines she can hear his pealing laugh bouncing off the surrounding concrete. 

They go home to the Tyler Estate and don’t leave her room for days.  Jackie pushes her way in, gently, almost timidly at first, but with a notably increasing stomp as the days tick by.  She replaces half empty plates with full ones.  Encourages, then asks, then tells Rose to get out of bed.  She complains about the spots of blue paint on the carpet where Rose forgot to put down newspaper.

Pete’s more lenient.  Rose hears them arguing.  “It’s not healthy,” is her mother’s preferred battle cry.  “Give her time,” is her dad’s constant retort.  The fight always ends with her mom’s tears and her dad’s condoling shushes.  Rose holds this Doctor tighter and turns up her stereo.

It’s a Monday when she throws on some clothes and bolts for the door so fast she stumbles and scrapes the arm she hasn’t wrestled into the grey sweater yet against the frame.  Purple and red blotches erupt beneath her pale skin but she doesn’t notice the sting, doesn’t pause, doesn’t glance back.  She can’t.  Suddenly this Doctor’s become a black hole that will swallow her completely if she looks him directly on.  Maybe he already has. 

She doesn’t go back into her room for a month.  She sleeps on the sofa and wears out the batteries in the TV remote.  She bangs doors and snaps at her little brother.  She drinks half a bottle of vodka at a time and wakes up by the toilet.  She spins her Beatle’s wheels on the driveway and breaks the speed limit on five different motorways.  For a month, she’s too angry to draw a full breath. 

It’s dark and raining when Pete finds her on the back lawn, hunched in the iron chair that nobody has moved, cold water bouncing off her upturned face.  He scoops her up and she makes no jibe that he’ll hurt his back.  She hasn’t eaten more than a piece of toast in three days.  Rose thinks she hears him whisper “not you too” as they drip across the kitchen floor, up the stairs and into her room.  She can’t be certain: she’s too deafened by the desolate sobs she hears as soon as she sees this Doctor. 

It takes a moment to realise they’re her own screams.

Time, already maintaining only a tenuous grip, and then merely to keep up the appearance it is the universe’s ultimate master, loses hold of Rose entirely.  Dark and light, glowing curtains, ticking clocks, they become just colours and sounds without context, without greater meaning.  She drifts from this world to all the others she has touched, breathed, run through, rough skin grasping her fingers and pulling her on, always on.  She travels under inferno skies and stolen planets, across grassy hillsides and along metallic corridors, chasing the hint of a smile in the darkness, a flash of shining black, of billowing brown, of windswept blue, following the echoes of three voices always just a breath away, a breath beyond where she can reach. 

Sometimes Rose catches glimpses of her mum by a window she should recognise, in a room she knows, where her clothes are scattered across the floor and a small boy sleeps in her mum’s lap.  She blinks and tries to sit up, runs her hand across her face which she finds wet and raw.  It almost connects, this picture, this scene, but pain sneaks in alongside understanding, a choking stab that cuts throat to gut, and she slumps down again and closes her eyes.  A hand appears in the dark and she takes it without hesitation.

She could run forever in the labyrinth of what is past, in the electric gas clouds of a cosmos they treated like a play thing, and maybe she does, maybe one version of Rose Tyler stays forever within these repeating catacombs of memory and fantasy and eyes that sparkle in the black, but this Rose Tyler, the shop girl from another dimension who saved the world with two words, cannot stay lost, will not stay lost, because no matter how deafening the screams of Daleks and stomps of Cybermen, or enticing the swirling tempest of I’m the Doctor, this is my plus one, no matter how great her own pain and ecstasy and loss, Rose can’t pretend that any of it is more than meagre prelude to what he must have suffered.  He fought demons she cannot envisage.  He held on.  He never gave up. 

Her throat is so dry Rose can barely swallow; the twisted blankets hold her feet fast as she tries to stretch her legs.  Her cream curtains are half open revealing misted white light swirling over the manicured lawns and the multi-coloured gnomes Mickey bought as a joke.  Her shoulders click, her lips taste of salt, her eyes sting.  She sits slowly, the world swimming into place.  She turns to the left, cotton sheets rustling, and sees this Doctor sitting by her bed.  Reality shatters intent and suddenly Rose can’t swallow, can’t breathe, and she starts to plummet. 

“Mummy, Daddy!  Rosie’s awake!”

The mattress bounces under her little’s brother’s weight. He grabs her attention and knocks air into her lungs, this exuberant little boy who doesn’t understand why offering his sister his favourite action figure to play with hasn’t been enough to get her to smile at him, and, tearfully choking his name, shaking away the blissful darkness clawing at her mind, Rose gathers him up in a desperate hug, clings tight to a vibrancy that time has yet to tarnish.   Her mum’s shriek of thanks to a deity the Tyler’s never really believed in erupts from the doorway.  Rose holds fast to Tony and their parent’s arms anchor them together.  The early dawn drifts through the glass. 

A week passes, then another, then a few more, and it’s fully winter when Rose is finally ready.  The shock hasn’t just vanished, the pain didn’t simply vaporise in the colourful explosions the bathed the sky on Bonfire Night, and many afternoons will still find her sitting on the lawn in the iron chair with a blanket wrapped round her shoulders, watching the heavy clouds drift across the sky like smoke, as gusting leaves scrape and flake against her legs, but they are fewer in number and Rose comes inside when the cold rain starts to spatter.

She picks Tony up from playschool.  She eats dinner with her family and gets exasperated when Jackie tells her to tidy her room.  She reads, and cooks, and cleans, and drives at the speed limit.  She looks at the clock. 

He stays beside her, especially at night, but she’s planned to go back to work after Christmas - she has a promise to keep – and Rose knows this Doctor can’t come with her on the next journey. 

First, she thinks of the Powell Estate, and just as quickly dismisses the idea. 

Jackie pitches a fit when Rose tells her parents she’s going to Cardiff - “I know it’s Christmas Eve, Mum, that’s sort of the point” – but her dad pulls one of his endless supply of strings and somehow they get a family suite at the Hilton.  Tony sings a butchered version of Jingle Bells the entire length of the M4.

Technically, she should do it outside the Millennium Centre, the heart of the rift, a permanent phenomenon whatever the dimension, but Rose figures it’ll be packed with drunken revellers wearing Santa Hats and placing bets on whether it’s set to snow, and she needs to do this alone. 

Jackie stays at the hotel, a hyperactive Tony helping her stick up tinsel.  She hugs her daughter tight.  “I love you so much, sweetheart, you know that.”  Pete whisks Rose away before her mum’s tears can start her off too.

Rose picks out a cliff top on the outskirts of Cardiff on the jeep’s SatNav, and she’s grateful it’s as deserted as it appeared on the tiny map.  They rumble along the dirt track, headlights bouncing off the frost covered dunes, chords of Fairytale of New York lilting quietly from the radio.  Her dad eases the car to a stop thirty feet from the edge and twists off the ignition.  They sit in silence for a moment, the mouth of the river Severn stretching out before them, its echoing roar slightly muffled by the closed windows, the yellow lights of a celebrating Cardiff and a distant Bristol bouncing off its black waves

“I don’t…”  Her dad trails off, mouth clamping shut, shameful shrug visible under his heavy overcoat. 

“S’all right, dad. I know.”  Rose gives him an attempt at a smile, and briefly touches his hand.  There are no right words. 

Part Two