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[Nov. 1st, 2007|01:17 am] |
title: ghost stories
rating: pg
pairing: rose/ten
summary: "rose tyler is a ghost." Rose didn't make it to the alternate universe, and the Doctor must deal with the repercussions of what she has gone through. Some things, even time can't change. And sometimes, forever isn't all it's cracked up to be. [post-Doomsday AU]
sequel to: she falls through holes--should definitely read that first, or you may be more than a little bit lost.
spoilers: up through Series 3, a bit for Torchwood but not really, and one sentence based on spoilers for S4, but you don't really need to know those to understand anything here!
a/n: this one is for ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) orange_crushed because she is made of teh awesome, and makes me feel like i'm writing in crayon. hope you enjoy, i just had to tell a ghost story on halloween. this wasn't even planned! hope everyone enjoys!
~*~
When Rose thinks of home, she thinks of the most mundane things. How her mother is coping. What Mickey must be thinking. If anyone dreams of her at all, on the other side. Rose wishes she could dream of them, but the only thing that comes when the sun sets and the cold moon rises is an aching stomach (she's still so hungry) and a mind that will not shut down.
The relentlessness of this place gets to her embarrassingly soon. Within the first month, she's thought about ending her misery in a million and one ways. Not that any of those moments are her finest, perhaps, but they're quite the exercise in creativity. There are stones that are sharp enough to cut into the tender skin of her wrist. Vines that are long enough, even on dead trees, to wrap around her neck. There are poisonous berries plucked off bushes. Almost experimental, almost detached, under that driving desperation to just--find something more. To change, when things here are so unchanging.
But in the end, that old enemy of survival instinct triumphs her despair, and though her knees ache, Rose walks.
"They'd be proud of me for keeping on," she whispers sometimes, though she knows that's not true. Everyone would be so disappointed in her, once they looked past the dried blood and the dirt and the sweat sticking to her skin. They'd see that she's given up, beneath that indomitable shell of humanity, the skin that persists even though it breaks, the muscles that heal even after they tear. Her body still goes on and on even while her mind filters the days and nights into a cycle of never-ending moments, but god, she is so tired. Tired of seeing the sun rise and then set and the moon rise and then set, like a parody of how life is supposed to be. Reminding her of what she's left behind, what she can never get back again.
Hope has died with the remains of the last sputtering Cyberman. Even the Daleks sit idle, no longer setting fire to shrubbery or screaming out idle threats. Rose is truly alone with no way out, and she would do anything for a way out. Anything.
She marks the days by scraping lightly around the width of her arm, the tip of an old bobby pin sharpened to prick her skin. One nick for every seven days. The expanse of flesh around her elbow is a mess now, but if she smears the blood away, the scabs tell her she's been here for approximately fifty-two weeks. One year.
Sometimes things pass by so quickly or so slowly that she can't mark it, though. Sometimes she closes her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them, the shadows hang differently and she's on another road than the one on which she started out. So maybe it's been longer than a year. Maybe it's been shorter. Rose doesn't even know if there's such a thing as time in this place.
Maybe it's already been one whole forever, and she's just at the beginning of another.
The clouds overhead rotate with every pulse-pound in her throat. The trees keep on dying, rotting like empty graves. This is where nothing ends, where all things persist, even if all a person wants is to go to sleep.
And then there's him. Moving among the leaves, tall and silent, with his coat billowing behind him. Those stupid shoes and his stupid hair and the stupid emptiness in his stupid, fake eyes. Rose knows it's not the Doctor. How can it be, when it's so bloody obvious he's locked on the wrong side of the barrier blocking her off from the world? (Or perhaps it's the right side, and unfamiliar jealousy thrills down her back at the thought of feeling London smog settle into her pores.)
But this shade, this shadow--it chases her like a ghost. Like a memory. It doesn't say much, but when she makes the mistake of turning to it for comfort, maybe putting a hand out or letting her eyes rest fondly on its face, it disappears. Not meant for comfort, her.
Meant to be haunted. Meant to be dogged into an early grave.
Rose snorts. An early grave--yeah, right. She wishes. And then she scratches her neck, and thinks despairingly of how she means that wish with every fibre of her being. Just for some peace. Just a little.
Her eyes fall shut, and when she opens them a split second later, she's on another path, headed in another direction, and the day starts again.
She fancies she hears the Doctor whistling a familiar tune as he follows her through Hell.
~*~
Rose Tyler is a ghost.
She showed up on the third day of the new year. Shortly after Astrid and the Titanic, while the Doctor was busy licking his wounds, all big and bad and brooding, the vortex sputtered and spit and then-- there she was.
Rose. Rose, standing stationary. Eeerily unmoving, even as the Doctor blinked and wobbled, hands braced against the console behind him.
She looked strange and beautiful in the pulsating glow of the TARDIS. Her skin the same sort of wispy, insubstantial grey of a gathering storm-cloud, her hair blowing staticky and wild, like white-noise. Eyes as bottomless as space, and just as black. Lips curved in a waiting smile, a swallowing darkness edging past the brilliant white of her teeth. And her hands, her lovely hands--
She put out her palm and wriggled her fingers and the arms of her jumper were torn, shredded so he could see the muscles in her shoulders fluttering like the wings of a butterfly. Fragile, fine muscles, corded thin under skin. So delicate, so insubstantial. So easily destroyed, every cell and atom of her.
She shouldn't have been there, whole and complete yet so terribly empty. A projection of entirety, each hair the way the Doctor remembered it, yet an unfamiliar lacking resonating in her every breath.
Rose stood then at that moment, silent and still, and so she stands even now, one week later. One week of watching. Waiting, a horrible blankness planted deep in those gauzy features that were once so bold. The Doctor thinks that if he were to smooth her brow, to tug on her wrist, to touch her at all, his hand would grasp nothing. He can't bear it, and so he holds onto his silence as steadily as if it were a tangible thing.
(Rose Tyler is a ghost and it's wrong now, so wrong, because when her fingers reach for his, it's like spiderwebs clinging to his brow.)
In some ways, it's worse because she's still the same as she ever was.
He closes his eyes and her mouth still whispers words of sticky sweetness, candy-floss soft, heavy like smoke curling into the sky. He runs and her steps still echo a haunting cadence, each footfall hitting the downbeat of his every breath--a teasing refrain, a taunting skipping rhyme. He flies through time and she still falls to the ground, her laughter reflecting off the TARDIS walls, the old roll-and-race of materializing in a foreign land, a big blue box spinning around and above them. It's exactly as he remembers, in so many ways.
But that's all that's left anymore. All that's ever been left. Recollections. Memories. Because everything dies. All things end. Even and especially Rose.
(Ah, though. Not Rose, at all. Rose persists, Rose lives on.
...Rose is gone.)
Martha has been gone exactly a week, TARDIS-time, and Jack has been gone much longer than that, if one cares to be precise. No one is around to see Rose now, sitting on the main console with nary a concern. Her toes skim the metal grating of the floor before plunging right through the surface, an abrupt amputation. The forced surgical cut, pieces of her tossed to the ether, the faint reminder of a green vortex whorling behind her head--making her an angel or a daemon, he's not sure which, anymore.
The Doctor releases a sigh at the sight of her anklebones, and finally, finally whispers her name.
Her eyes meet his, and for a moment, he can see colorless roads stretching into infinity, a sky burning bloody red and a moon glittering brittle white. For a moment, he can see beyond the barriers, into graveyards and dirt and twisted trees. For a moment, he knows without doubt where Rose has returned from, and why, and the truth of it--the almost relief of knowing for sure--brings a thunderous ache to his chest, a rising bile to his throat.
He pressed a button and it obliterated his entire planet once, but in this second, nothing feels worse than the sense of responsibility weighing his head down. What has he done to this girl he loved?
Nothing, not nearly enough. He didn't go back for her. He didn't look for her hard enough. He lost her, and she lost herself and now, how is he supposed to find her? How is he supposed to fix her?
"Oh, Doctor." Rose says, blinking. Compassion flitters through the brown of her eyes, melting into a raging, roiling bittersweet black. Her voice is song without melody, the sky without stars. "Have you missed me?"
~*~
She is so hot.
The sun--it blisters her skin so that even a scant breeze schafes against her painfully. It seems that nothingness has progressed rapidly into a study of extremes, into a thousand circles of a thousand new tortures, into squares of space that hold new horrors for her. Rose watches as the sky bleeds and she measures the hours by the degrees with which the sun burns hotter, flames higher. The whites flare into red then dim to black periodically, and she's reminded of that old joke, the one the Doctor used to tell over breakfast on the TARDIS:
"What's black and white and red all over?" Once, she'd rolled her eyes and flicked a page of the Daily Sun right at the Doctor's nose. Now, though, she knows the answer, and the knowledge is at once epic and anticlimatic.
The Howling. This place, her jail, it's black and white and red all over, black clouds and white fire and red sky. Shapes atop the rocks lining the looping paths, Daleks frozen in time, screaming their unearthly screams and Cybermen lying like husks, legs kicked up into the air, dust around them thick and choking.
And the Doctor. The Doctor or his shade, following her on every road she walks, his hands in his pockets and his gaze brushing her in just the way that his fingers used to.
He doesn't say a word to her, most days. Though she talks to him. Sometimes she confides in him stories, things she never got to share with him when they were travelling together. Jimmy Stone, and the time she pushed Mickey into the sandbox, and the sweets she stole from the market just because she could. The red bicycle when she was twelve, and the anger with which she thinks of it now frightens her a little. Load of good the present does her now, she sighs, when all she's got are her thighs and calves and battered feet.
Sometimes she makes fun of him, tells him stuff she's been dying to say ever since she met him. The way his tender care of his hair makes her look positively slovenly, how bloody ugly that blue suit hanging in his wardrobe was, the fact that she found his previous self sexier but the current one made her heart hurt in ways not even qualifiable as merely love.
But sometimes she yells at him. Screams at his echo-self until she's hoarse, all her anger and hurt and fear pouring out as she shouts and rages. She tells him she wishes he had never picked her up. She tells him he should have told her he loved her. She tells him to stop following her, if he's not going to save her.
"You told me you weren't ever gonna leave me, Rose," he admonishes when she cries, when she's too overwhelmed to scream. Tears stripe the sunken hollows of her cheek, but he only stands there, looking at her. "You wanted to be with me for the rest of your life, didn't you? Well. You're not dead yet, missy, so here I am."
Can a person even die if they're already in Hell? No, she supposes, and she's not dead yet, true. She's worse than that.
She's eternal.
And so are the Daleks and so are the Cybermen and so are the fires and the bloody suns and the grey, grey roads snaking into the crimson horizon. And so is the Doctor.
She once told him no-one would ever split them up. These days, the irony is not exactly lost on her. Not even a little bit, not at all.
~*~
"Yes. I've missed you," the Doctor says, and the words are worked out around a ragged breath full of tears.
Fires have burned in his gaze and tragedies have slept in his silences, but this body has never cried in front of her. Never shared that part with her, never been quite that human for her. How different he must seem, with moisture tracking lines beneath his ancient eyes. So different than who she left behind. An alien before, a Time Lord who watched his planet crumble to ash and who kept his hearts in a cage of distance and superiority. And now, he's just a man. A man who has been broken by a little human girl barely two decades old.
(Rose is laughing, and the sound is terrible, hollow.)
"I missed you every day for the past year." The Doctor's voice is flat. "I missed you for so long. And now you're here. Only, how? How are you here, Rose?"
And the Doctor knows better than to be happy about seeing her again. He knows better than to look at her in wonder and joy, and she knows better, too. The softness of her cheeks is as sharp as cut glass now, her expressions vividly harsh despite all their colorless lines and edges. The smile on her face, once so abandoned and free, is more of a grimace, gums and canines bared in dangerous, predatory warning. Rose looks wary and worn, grim and gruesome, her features blurry and her gait strange and stilted. Like a cracked china-doll, or a wounded animal. Like a lost soul.
Like she's been walking forever, and perhaps she has. With him, the Doctor, as the ever-elusive goal.
She swallowed Time to save him once. This time, Time swallowed her. Snuffed her out, trapped her between worlds, between realities. And to come back from that, to cross a chasm as consuming and boundless as dead space, well--it's not going to be for hugs and hand-holding.
He can taste that fact in the very current of her quiet.
Still he continues, his voice pitched low and awful. "When the transmission failed, I guessed--I feared--" He stops, eyes unseeing. "And I was correct. I was correct and I still didn't do a thing, did I? Useless. So useless."
(Six impossible things before breakfast, he said, and he wasn't even around see her die.)
His head bows in implicit, yearning apology. His hands shake as he raises them up in supplication. "You've been following me around for days," he whispers. "I've felt you. I've seen you." He closes his eyes and falls to his knees. "But you're dead, Rose. All that you are is an imprint, an impossibility." His next word is a moan. "Revenge."
At this, she moves. "Oh, no, love," she croons delightedly, stepping forward. She bends to let her lips linger near his ear, and the chill of her skin prickles like needles. "I'm not vengeance."
("I'm a promise.")
Forever, and all that. Just as she wanted.
One way or another.
~*~
The shade disappears one day, and though Rose never bothered to track how long it was even there, the time she got with this reminder from home, it feels unfairly short. He was just sand running through her fingers, and now is when Hell really begins, she supposes.
She turns around, and there's no dark form in the forest, no familiar-but-empty eyes staring at her from between branches. Two suns set and two moons rise before she moves from her spot, staring into the trees, and she finally realizes from the hole in her chest that he is truly gone. Whatever he was, whatever he was supposed to mean, he's gone.
Rose doesn't know how long she goes, laying her cheek against her sodden, torn jumper. It's just another way she's lost him, she figures, and fuck all, she's so tired of him leaving her behind.
A hundred months she's been here. One hundred months, if the silvery scars lining her skin are any indication. One hundred months in deadspace and she's finally reached a point where she wants to walk off the bloody path and find out what it all means. Been so ready to cut her body to ribbons all this time, just for release, but turning off the traditional road? Finding out what lies beyond the sure footing of the ground beneath her feet? She's been too bloody terrified to do it, only now, Rose wants to see what will happen. Wants to know whether there is ever any escape.
Nothing to lose, after all. Now she really is alone, all alone. Not even her own head will conjure up a hallucination to keep her company.
Once, she turned the Dalek Emperor to dust. Now, she scoffs at the thought of cowering, being cowed. At crying anymore at the loss of her tagalong ghost, because though the drop below is dark and unknown, the suspended, endless paths that she keeps walking seem worse. She can't keep putting one foot in front of the other, not when each step leads her deeper into this place she doesn't belong.
Anything for a way out, she once said. Anything at all.
Maybe the shadow disappearing is a good thing. Maybe it has freed her, in some small way.
This, she realizes, must be the day her faith finally runs out, the day her shadow blinked away. She is truly alone, and so she is truly--finally--angry. "Followed him forever," she whispers to herself, "Least he could do is stick around as a bloody figment." But even dream-Doctor's have somewhere to be, she laughs, and she gives a bitter smile as the wind kicks up and the dust chokes her.
She stands on a road that leads to more road that leads to more road, but suddenly, where it counts at least, there's finally no more pathways to take. Only the knowledge that there are two choices.
One: Turn around and choose another path, a path that maybe, someday, might lead out of this place. No guarantees. There never are, those. Just hope, and faith in some possible tomorrow. A Doctor who didn't believe enough to come find her.
Two: Jump. Stumble off the rocks and let the hot air lift her body up and then slam her down, breaking her limbs into jagged pieces, dashing her skull against groups of stones, letting the blood and guts and flesh and bone run into something less contained then this prison, this body. Better than trudging on till the end of time, innit? Only time is circular, so--
Either way, there's no end. Is there? And Rose just wants there to be an end.
She closes her eyes.
She jumps.
And the ground rushes up to meet her, and the Cybermen wail and the Daleks scream, and when she opens her eyes--
--she's in the TARDIS once more.
~*~
Jack has a machine, the Doctor finds out.
"A ghost machine, Doctor," Jack clarifies over the crackling vortex-muddied reception of the TARDIS telephone. "Nanotechnological quantum tranducers. Takes human emotions and makes them like imprints--ghosts, to me and you. Or maybe just me, since you're all alien and superior and you know better, right? Anyway, yeah, feasibly it could reverse the process--convert the ghost into human emotion, compress it back into the device. But if you don't mind me asking, why would you need it?"
The Doctor's not proud of how he's treated Jack, but his voice is steel, nonetheless. "I do mind you asking, actually," he says. "I'll be in touch." He hangs up, and Rose snorts.
"Ooh," she says. "Rude. Still so rude. You can't just take the boy for a spin, tell everyone he's dead, leave 'im stranded, then expect him to be all nice-like, Doctor. Just not on."
"I'm sorry, Rose," the Doctor says softly. He's become accustomed to saying this. Doesn't know if it'll ever be enough. "So, so sorry."
"Do you know," Rose says, ignoring him. "I fell the length of what seemed like entire buildings and didn't even break a bone? Probably I was dead as soon as I jumped, yeah? Anticlimatic ending if there ever was one. Rather would've gone with the Gelth, myself." Her eyes slit. "Least you would've gone with me, then."
The Doctor tries not to shiver at the bitterness in her tone. Reminds himself that this is not Rose. That this is just a ghost--an imprint. An emotion. Rose is dead. Somehow, that thought isn't any easier than this bastardization of who she was.
"Anyway," and her voice is bright again, her moods mercurial, "point is, if I'm remembering my time with the heart of the TARDIS correctly--and Doctor, death clarifies quite a bit, that was less than a proper snog you gave me in the end--Jack can't die. I fixed him properly enough. So I'm wondering--how'd he first find out? Fisticuffs? Knife? Alien tech? Nasty bout of syphillis?"
"Gunshot, actually." The Doctor smiles grimly. "You know that you did it, Rose?"
"Shot him? No, sorry, was a bit busy walking the immortal roads in Hell, you wanker."
The Doctor flinches. "No. I mean, you know that you gave him life. Forever. With your all-seeing memory of when the Time Vortex was inside you? You saw that, surely? What decisions like this cost people? What they do? Why couldn't you leave it be? Why couldn't you just let him die--"
"Why didn't I die, you mean." Her voice is knowing. "I wanted to. And I chose Hell over a world without you, Doctor. You with your all-seeing memory of what the Time Lords know or could know...you saw that, surely? The way it could have been, me trapped on the other side in another universe, never seeing you again." Her feet swing. "It meant death, it meant guts and less than glory, but all I wanted was that chance. To see you again. To always see you. But even then...in that place? I wanted to die. Thought I would, actually."
Her feet go through the console and he looks at her, all fuzzy and blurred along the edges.
"But I said I'd never leave you," and her voice is so young.
The Doctor turns. Remembers frozen waves sparkling overhead, and the warmth of her hand in his. Remembers being alive, well and truly alive with this woman, and thinks that nothing, not anything and most certainly not him, is worth this half-life.
Jack has a machine. That is what's important.
"But you said you'd never leave me," the Doctor echoes, and his voice is so, so old.
-finis-- |
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