#i have no excuses its 2am and i was feeling restless so you get unedited drabbles

[xawkward-ariesx]

Rose Tyler doesn't have scars.

At least not in the way that normal people do. She used to, once upon a time. Jagged areas of raised flesh where her skin had knit itself back together from childhood injuries acquired from the reckless abandon of youth and from an ex who threw around harsh words and even harsher hands. But the days where scars meant silvery patches of skin are no more an occurrence than her aging.

Rose Tyler will always look permanently twenty years old with streaks of gold running through her flesh were Bad Wolf knit her back together with the power of stardust and time vortices instead of allowing her to bleed out as mortality would demand. She had hated them at first. Yet another reminder that she was broken and yet no longer human. Another sign that she would have to hide from people lest they realise there was something not quite right about her.

But with time she came to appreciate them the same way she had the marks left behind by Jimmy. They were a reminder that she had survived. She had survived an army of Daleks and it's emperor, absorbing the time vortex, becoming a goddess of Time temporarily and had come out the other side with a heart that still beat and blood still running through her veins, so very much alive despite the odds that had been stacked against her. She could accept that though her skin may glimmer with streaks of gold that glowed in a way that no human should, that they were also a sign that she had survived something that should have otherwise destroyed her.

That didn't mean she felt any need to showcase them though. All the glittering cracks that showed she'd survived what the universe had thrown at her, that was. They were just apart of her that was all. Another thing that she had to accept as her new normal regardless of how she might feel about them.

Or so she had thought.

She was in a museum in the wrong country, in the wrong decade waiting for the dimension canon to pull her back, unable to do anything about her destination but wait. It had only seemed natural that she might as well try and blend in by wandering around the museum while she waited to be pulled back through the void once more.

She hadn't been in a museum in a long time, not for any particular grudge against them, she just didn't have the time for frivolities anymore. The last time she'd been in a museum the Doctor had been pulling her along babbling about their exhibit on the development of Venusian aikido practices through the ages. There was no Doctor by her side now to correct the plaques laid out by the museum as she meandered through the artifacts on display. Despite herself she felt the ache of his absence most strongly in quiet moments like this when there nothing to keep her preoccupied. It was with that thought in mind that had pushed her to turn to the next display.

Within the glass case that was mounted to the wall before her, was a beautiful blue and white vase with veins of gold running through the pottery's structure in spidery webs. It was beautiful. There was no denying the love and care that had gone first into its creation and then into the repair of the vase. She turned to read the plaque accompanying it.

"Kintsugi ( 金継ぎ, "golden joinery"), also known as kintsukuroi ( 金繕い, "golden repair"),is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold or other metals. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise by beautifying the cracks, which serve as a visual record of the object's history."

Rose smiled to herself. It was a rather lovely concept to take something cherished but broken and painstakingly put it back together but to do so in a way that made the damage part of its story rather than something to hide away in shame or pretend didn't exist at all, elevating it in the process.

Perhaps there was a lesson in there for herself.