#or are we just buckling it together with 2024 onward and calling it all one thing?

[nyx-knacks-writes]

The Parting of the Ways (Rose's POV)

For my first bit of Doctor Who writing... Nine's regeneration, from Rose's POV. Please be nice. I tried my very best. It took me upwards of two hours to get through the video because I was trying to be as detailed as possible with the Doctor's movements. And because I misheard the dialogue several times over and had to correct it.

All the dialogue, of course, belongs to the BBC.

“What happened?”

“Don’t you remember?”

A beat of silence passed by as Rose laid on the floor of the TARDIS, glancing about to confirm her location. The Doctor stood at the console, looking between the panel, the center column, and Rose herself. She lifted her head and found it swimming, hazy images passing by in front of her eyes, foggy and indistinct, just shy of tangible. It only took a moment for her to shake them off, though, and she carefully pulled herself up into something halfway to a sitting position, knees in the air in front of her.

“It’s like…” She paused for a moment as the Doctor looked away. A beautiful melody seemed to echo in her ears, something like she imagined the sunrise might make if it could sing. Or maybe it was more of a duet between the Sun as it rose and the Moon as it set. Threaded through the joy and love in the song was a terrible, haunting loneliness, as though the singer knew that this could not last. The sorrow of knowing such beauty must come to an end infiltrated and surrounded the gentle joy of the melody.

“There was a singing.” She lowered her knees to the floor and rested her palms on the cool metal, still shaking the cobwebs from her mind.

“That’s right. I sang a song and the daleks ran away,” the Doctor supplied, looking over and offering that big, wide charming smile. Baloney. The singer was female. It couldn’t have been him, though he was certainly telling the truth that the daleks were no longer around. He was too… easy, for lack of a better word. At ease, that was the phrasing she was looking for. They’d dealt with daleks (okay, one dalek the first time, but the number wasn’t important) before, and they put him rather on edge. They made him tenser, sharper, like a sword coming out of its sheath. The total opposite of how he was acting at the moment.

“I was at home. No I wasn’t, I, I was in the TARDIS and… ah… there was this light...”

In the corner of her eye, she caught the Doctor glancing downward, along the direction of his arm. Something glowed golden on the console, but she elected to ignore it. It couldn’t have been terribly important. Just some monitor going off, in all likelihood, reminding him to perform some regular maintenance task.

“I can’t remember anything else.”

It was painfully true. Like wisps of cloud in the wind, Rose couldn’t seem to get a solid grip on what had happened. Something had happened, clearly, but what? The ghosts of the ghosts of her memories were fading fast, turned transparent in mere seconds.

Another beat of silence.

The Doctor’s gaze fell back to her, though she didn’t see it for a moment as she performed another visual sweep of her surroundings. Rose made an irritated face and shook her head, at last deciding that it really wasn’t worth dwelling on. She glanced back up at the Doctor, lifting her eyebrows as she caught him watching her.

“Rose Tyler.” A little huff of a laugh escaped him, and his lips curled upward, back into that lovely smile of his before it pinched back inward as she prepared to lift herself up to stand.

“I was gonna take you to so many places. Barcelona? Not the city, Barcelona, the planet, Barcelona.” His face seemed to open as his eyebrows shot upward before closing again toward the end of the sentence. His shoulders bobbed up and down with his movements as he shifted around for emphasis. “You’d love it, fantastic place.” And there it was again, that smile that opened his face and sapped away every ounce of intimidation that he possessed. “They’ve got dogs with no noses.” He laughed at that, a wheezy little sort of laugh that turned into a ha-ha-ha, and Rose couldn’t help smiling with him as she finally pushed herself away from the floor.

“Imagine how many times a day you end up telling that joke and it’s still funny!” His eyes slipped back to the console.

“Then why can’t we go?”

Back to her.

“Maybe you will! And maybe I will. But not like this.” Back to the console again, the cryptic bugger.

“You’re not making sense.” It was Rose’s turn to have her face pinch together, though for her it was more in confused thought than clear thought.

“I might never make sense again! I might have two heads, or no head.” His current, normal, real-world head turned back and forth as he spoke, presumably checking in on whichever meters and dials told him the current state of the ship. “Imagine me with no head! And don’t say that’s an improvement,” he added as Rose smiled again, showing off her pearly teeth.

The Doctor dropped his head toward the console before picking it up again and swinging it to look at Rose once more.

“But it’s a bit dodgy, this process.”

The smile began to fade.

“You never know what you’re gonna end up with.” Without warning, he doubled over and sort of fell backward, his hands flying to his stomach as some sort of electronic wail ran through the air. His midsection glowed golden, and Rose lunged toward him. She didn’t have a clue what was going on, of course, how could she, but surely there was some way for her to help!

“Doctor!”

“Stay away!” he commanded, throwing an arm outward to ward her off. Admittedly, it stung. Hadn’t they been the best of friends? Hadn’t they had wonderful adventures together, even if they’d been rather less than safe? Hadn’t they… A single memory from whatever had happened between getting home and finding herself in the TARDIS once again nudged its way into her brain as she stared at him with concern. Hadn’t he kissed her? Hadn’t they been the best of friends who’d just so happened to fall in love along the way?

The Doctor brought his chin to his chest as his face contorted with pain, and Rose noticed that the golden light had vanished.

“Doctor, te… Tell me what’s going on.” Her voice wobbled slightly at the beginning of the sentence before firming up. He couldn’t just do this, just, be so openly struggling and in pain without letting her help.

He leaned his head back, gritting his teeth.

“I absorbed all the energy of the Time Vortex, and no one’s meant to do that!” He smiled again, the absolute nutter, and Rose paused, looking him up and down with her mouth open as though to say something.

“Every cell in my body’s dying.” Her eyes snapped back up to his face.

“Can’t you do something?” Rose edged closer near-imperceptibly.

“Yeah! I’m doing it now.” The Doctor came a little closer to the console and leaned on it for support. “Time Lords have this little trick, it’s, sort of a way of cheating death.” He paused, looking downward as his face wrinkled with pain.

“Except…” He lifted his head again to look at her.

“Except, it means I’m gonna change.” His head bobbed up and down in a halfway frantic sort of nod, the sort of nod one nods to communicate the sentiment that the present topic or situation is rather less than pleasant, but there’s really nothing to be done about it. “And I’m not gonna see you again. Not like this. Not with this daft old face.” Yet another smile. If he thought he was being reassuring, well… okay, it was kind of working, but it wasn’t like everything was alright again. Things might never be quite alright again, not if she was losing her Doctor. Not if she was losing the man who’d opened her eyes to what the world was really like, who’d shown her the marvels of space and time, and, admittedly, a good amount of the oddness going on in her own hometown in her own home-time.

“And before I go—”

“Don’t say that!”

“Rose.” He lifted his head from where it had dropped to his chest in order to meet her gaze, and oh, those eyes… He’d accepted his fate. It was obvious. His face had been screwed up tight, but now he’d opened it again just to pause, and Rose closed her mouth to let him speak.

“Before I go, I just want to tell you you were fantastic.” His head shook from side to side on the word, the catchphrase that he couldn’t go a day without saying, and the dam broke.

Tears welled up in Rose’s eyes, and an overwhelming ache stained her heart like a drop of dye in a glass of water. She wanted nothing more than to go to him, to hug him, to feel that leather jacket against her body and those lovely strong arms wrapped around her one more time. But of course, he’d never allow it. He had told her to stay back, and it must have been to protect her. Why else would he be so determined to keep her away when he must know how much of a stab through the heart it was to be… to be saying goodbye. To be saying a million things in her mind that seemed to choke in her throat and drift up to sting at her eyes, leaving them unsaid. And there he was, smiling through it all like he wasn’t leaving her behind, like he wasn’t disappearing away from her, never to be seen or heard or touched or felt again. If he wasn’t dying already, she’d kill him herself.

“Absolutely fantastic. And you know what?” he waited a moment, just a brief little moment. “So was I!” he concluded with a final, quick little nod. Rose smiled at him, one last time. That was the last thing she wanted him to see of her. A smile, something to let him know how much she loved him as he disappeared before her eyes.

His body went rigid, hands splaying out to the sides and head tilting back as though he were about to scream upward to whatever god or higher being might be listening. The force of the energy around him threw Rose backward, and she had to cling to one of the coral-like pillars in the TARDIS in order to avoid being thrown back even further.

Though she couldn’t see as the bones of his face shifted and changed, Rose did see a new plume of hair sprout from the Doctor’s skull, replacing the short brown hair she’d grown to love. The golden light faded away, and someone entirely new stood there in place of the Doctor, in place of her Doctor. He turned his head toward her.

“Hello. Oka— Mmm.”

He stopped speaking as quickly as he’d started, and the way his lips puckered and the skin of his cheeks hollowed and bulged in certain places seemed to indicate that he was probing around his mouth with his tongue.

“New teeth. That’s weird. So where was I?”

He looked toward the floor before looking back up at Rose, though he seemed to look through her rather than at her.

“Oh, that’s right. Barcelona.” He smiled and got something of a crazed look in his eyes as he finished, and all Rose could think was that he was so different.

Big, fluffy, chocolate brown hair. Brown eyes to match, replacing the icy blue eyes that had held so much, icy blue eyes that had watched her so carefully the first time he’d ever met her. This man was as skinny as a twig, a very slight bit taller than the Doctor, and a tad higher-pitched in the voice. 

What had he done with her Doctor?