Chapter Text
There is an envelope sitting on her kitchen table.
A TARDIS blue envelope.
That one-of-a-kind and never-to-be-replicated (no matter how hard she tried) shade of blue that had filled her heart with a brilliant golden song and opened her eyes to the never-ending expanses of the universe.
And it was sitting on her kitchen table.
In the form of an envelope?
Rose Tyler was confused and shocked. This is an experience that does not happen much these days.
But after all this time?
Rose Tyler was frozen, speechless. This also does not happen much these days.
It was easier to isolate herself and try not to feel anything, to not interact with anyone; they all leave her in the end anyway, her family, her husband, her best friend, even strangers left her in the end.
Traveling the stars, saving planets, and being the hero whispered about in campfire tales, alone, for centuries, millennia, had gotten old about 20 years ago.
The Lonely Goddess, they had called her, among dozens of other hushed names. But that was over. She was taking a break from being the protector of the universe. Nothing but solitude and barren planets. Much better than putting her heart on the line over and over, caring for everyone but herself, not being able to save everyone… again and again.
She shook the dark thoughts from her head and tried to think about who or what could have put that envelope there, but no, she had been parked in the middle of nowhere in some backwood swamp, on some uninhibited planet on the edge of the universe, in the year who knows what for the last several months, and she was standing in the doorway of an empty kitchen. In her empty TARDIS.
Her TARDIS that had only ever occupied a single passenger in 200 years of travel through time and space.
The ship was practically one of the only pieces of home she had left, her real home. Her home, which she missed every day. Her home universe that she could just barely feel in the darkest part of her mind, that she tried to push down and ignore to save herself from the pain, taunting the edges of her senses from across the void with each passing day, driving her deeper and deeper into her depression.
She cared for the ship more than she cared for herself at this point.
Her very own TARDIS that she had grown, and nurtured, and bonded with, and later, after everyone had gone, she spent countless hours sorting through messes of tubes and wires and scrap metal building a console around her gorgeous, budding heart, alone, working through her tears while singing the song that the fledgeling TARDIS’ mother had sung to her so long ago, her Sister her home, all the while praising and encouraging the fledgling ship through their bond to start building her own walls and-
And there is an envelope?
Rose practically tripped over her feet as she came out of her daze and scrambled from the doorway. Eyes never once leaving the envelope as she made her mad dash forward. Lights around her flickered rhythmically, brightening fully to illuminate the room, and the chair in front of her slid to her side from under the kitchen table as Rose crashed into the edge of the table's surface. She gripped the edges of the wood tightly, honey-gold eyes frantically wide and eyebrows inching towards her hairline as she stared at the impossible thing in front of her.
Not impossible, just very, very unlikely.
Rose Tyler, scrawled in neat loops, smooth silver ink being the only thing on the side facing her.
Her breath stuttered, re-reading her name, tracing those letters with desperately hopeful eyes over and over again. She recognized that handwriting. That oh so distinct chicken scratch that never seemed to quite lose the elegant circular style its owner preferred, no matter how much time had passed or how the hand writing it had physically changed.
She let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding.
Her Doctor.
On that beach, when he left her here in this world with a copy of himself with barely even a goodbye, Rose Tyler had nearly broken herself, right alongside her broken heart.
—-
Falling hard onto her knees, breaking their spur-of-the-moment kiss, Rose choked out a sob. The TARDIS was gone. She had felt them leaving, the TARDIS practically scraping claws across her mind, desperately trying to grab hold as she faded out of existence in front of her. Her home was gone. Again. He didn’t even stay long enough to give her a proper hug.
He left her here.
The metacrisis Doctor, the human copy that didn’t taste the same as HER Doctor, slowly crouched beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder.
She sobbed even harder, dropping her head into her hands. Choking out breaths as tears kept falling and falling, seemingly with no end. He was gone. He had promised her forever.
After a few moments of heartbreaking sobs, the copy cleared his throat as he rubbed circles on her back. “Rose,” he began, voice thick with emotion, “I-”
She cut him off with a vicious snarl, quickly sitting straight and pushing at his chest with more force than she knew she possessed, making him fall back into the sand, stunned at the sudden burst of aggression. Her face was ruined with streaks of mascara running down it, eyes red and blazing with equal parts anger and heartbreaking sorrow.
She stood slowly, one deliberate step at a time, until she was looming over him.
“You don’t understand,” Rose gritted out. “Somethin’s happened, an’ I’ve changed.” Her fists clenched at her sides, knuckles white. Her body was tense and stiff. “I could feel ‘em,” the copy wearing her love’s face gasped, watching her tap an index finger against her temple, his eyes widening in horror at her words, “I can’t feel you”.
_____
Sinking into the chair that the ship had been pulled out for her and ignoring the excited chittering of her TARDIS humming in the back of her mind, Rose’s eyes never strayed from that mysterious blue envelope. She sat for a moment, both hands on the table in front of her, fingertips just inches away from the letter, staring at it.
Her human Doctor had explained it to her, the Time Lord's side of the story, how he hadn’t realized what had happened to her. How he would never have left her if he had known.
How sorry he was.
How, somehow, her entire biology was rewritten to match his own. Bad Wolf. It always came back to the Big Bad Wolf.
But he was too thick, too stuck in his everlasting self-pity and doubt and knowledge that she would leave him eventually, to look at what had happened right in front of his eyes.
In the frenzy that had been her transforming into Bad Wolf and him absorbing the excess energy, then dying and regenerating, his senses were dulled from the leftover regeneration energy racing through him; he didn’t notice that she had changed just as much as he had in that moment.
He didn’t realize that the faint scent that she carried had deepened, becoming stronger, her taste clearer, her teeth had sharpened to a slight dull point, and her telepathic and time senses were becoming stronger than even his own. That she had become perfect for him in all the ways that he could have never dreamed possible. She had wanted to save him and keep him safe, forever. And as long as someone was crying and desperate, asking for a Doctor, for her Doctor, she would be there too, watching over, helping, protecting.
The human Doctor had laughed darkly, cursing himself.
Everything about him had dulled in his grief that first regeneration after the war. His senses were barely even good enough to be considered up to the Time Lord standard. He could barely smell her before, but he could barely smell anything in that body. He had thought the new regeneration just had a better nose.
He was so happy in this regeneration, born out of love for her, born in love with her, that for once, he didn’t even think to question why he could smell her so much clearer than any other human he’d ever met.
Rose stared at the envelope, trapped in her own thoughts as she remembered every adventure from the word run. Every laugh, every cry, every stolen look, and gentle touch.
They had loved each other fiercely, having finally given in to their feelings when adrenaline was high and never once looking back. Back when he was still all heavy northern accent and warm leather and so sure that he wasn’t good enough for her, his hearts were so guarded as to not be shattered again. But she had taken a sledgehammer right to his walls every time she smiled at him, every time she said the perfect thing to make him feel not so alone in the universe.
Even the Dalek had noticed their feelings for each other and had threatened ‘the woman he loved’.
He just couldn’t stand another moment without her. After saving the day and leaving all the humans behind to find their way, they ran hand in hand back to their home, giving in to the emotions that had been brewing since the second he said ‘Run’, leaving that godforsaken museum in Utah behind and crashing through the TARDIS doors, taking each other right on the console… and again on the jumpseat.
Their relationship was overwhelming in their undeniable love for each other.
A hand that would always fit, two broken halves meeting in all their jagged edges, even after his regeneration. A look shared across a room that conveyed more than just emotions. Two bodies that worked perfectly in sync in all aspects of life. A name whispered in her ear with the stars and her mother as their only witness.
Two souls joined as one in a way that the Doctor didn’t realize was possible, and she didn’t know what it meant until it was too late. Until she was stuck with a man who looked like the one she loved but didn’t smell, or feel, or come close to the one she had bonded with.
Her mate, the human Doctor, had said. Her alpha. Something he could never begin to compare to, he was just too… human.
She and her human Doctor had figured it out together.
All they ever did was talk. All they had in this universe together was time to talk.
One night, in the throes of passion after another successful adventure, the Time Lord had bitten her. One moment, they were joined, mind and body, as they often did in this regeneration to further deepen their connection and share their love as their bodies moved in tandem. While in one moment he whispered his declarations of love in Gallifreyian into the column of her neck, in the next moment, spurred on by her sweet saccharine voice and lustful thoughts swirling through his mind, dripping with desire, begging, intoxicatingly so, to mark her, he gave in to the overwhelming need to take, to claim.
And she had bitten him right back.
He didn’t know it was possible for him to be so happy and satisfied, licking over the wound that she allowed him to make, basking in the telepathic connection she had allowed him to bridge during their passionate tryst, her mind was beautiful and golden and sung just for him, drowning out the pain of his empty mind full of broken bonds.
Rose, of course, had no idea what she was doing when she bit him back, or, more precisely, what process they had accidentally started.
He had wanted it, craved her so badly, to drown himself in her golden light and embrace everything that she was. Every time she let him into her mind, he craved more. To be able to take her and keep her as his in every impossible way.
To bite her and feel her bliss swirling around with his own, bond with her, mark her as his.
The Doctor wanted to give in and just imagine, just for a moment, that she could be his, even beyond being his wife, to be his like that , forever, his mate.
He lay content and for once, not thinking about anything, opening himself up completely to her. Not a single thought or emotion of his own running through his brain for the first time since the end of the war as he stroked the soft skin over her spine, unashamed in his pure enjoyment of the feeling of her still so wet and warm all around him, her mind dancing merrily through his own, easing the pain of the millions of broken bonds etched into his mind. Simply relishing in the moment of stillness together as his knot subsided and her heavy breathing slowed.
Rose had always been the more wild one, thoroughly enjoying the foreign feel of him from that first time, unlike anything she'd ever felt before, but oh so right, and they weren't compatible species, plus there was the infertility curse on the Time Lords, so in this instance, so for the first time in her life, she could feel everything. Biting and scratching and leaving marks that would last for days, even with his superior biology. While the Doctor was always careful with his precious pink and yellow human, he worshiped her with his touch, gentle and delicate.
He restrained himself every time to not damage her in any way. She was too precious.
But just this once, the Doctor had given in to his primal urges and given her what she wanted, what she begged for, what he wanted more than anything. After he had bitten her, he was so dazed and so content that he didn’t notice the connections falling into place, a whisper of a new bond, barely starting to form between the two of them in the middle of a sea of broken ones. He didn’t realize they had joined in yet another way. They had properly bonded. Mated. For life.
Looking back, the human Doctor didn't know he could be blind to what was right in front of him. To what was happening inside of him. Mating on Gallifrey was not a common thing; he’d never done it before, he'd only experienced familial bonds through his parents, siblings, and later children and grandchildren. He hadn’t even mated with his first wife. They’d been content to just share the casual bond all Gallifteyans shared, another bond lost in the vast ocean of bonds living in the backs of their minds.
Millions of casual bonds holding an entire empathetic and touch telepathic species together, and the rigid, political nature of marriages and their uptight culture behind romance and physical intimacy made anyone choosing to go through with a mating bite not only extremely rare, but unheard of. Physical intimacy, not even discussed in biology classes in schools, only ever talked about in hushed whispers in dark bars on planets light-years away. The Doctor had only ever met one bonded pair of Gallifreyians in his whole life before the Time War. In the first few months of traveling with Susan, they stopped on another planet, and Susan went off alone. He found himself wandering, and two strangely costumed women, sitting alone in a dimly lit corner of an outdoor bar, waved him over, hearing his native tongue spoken to him spoken in such a casual way on a planet so far away, in a manner that Susan didn't even speak with him, drawing him right in.
An odd mask hid half of the Alpha woman's face, and perception-filtered jewelry concealed both of their presences; the mystery shrouding these two women also drew him in, making him want to know more about the pair. After a few rounds of ginger beer and a sputtered-out confession of a lack of knowledge from the Doctor at their admittance of being mated, the strange pair set out to explain the process of physical intimacy and mating to him.
Physical Intimacy, the Gallifreyan phrase spat out by the darker-skinned omega like a curse, and replaced with new terms: sex, masturbation, getting off, making love, fucking, mating.
Sex and pleasure and knotting (something the young Doctor blushed furiously at as the Alpha who smelled comfortingly of the wet soil on Gallifrey, sympathatically patted his shoulder, holding in a laugh as her unpleasant smelling mate continued to explain), consent to claim both ways through a telepathic bond, and a bite, right over the primary scent gland. Nothing would happen at first, as the instantaneous bond would be deadly even to the strongest of minds, but instead followed by three days of gradually building bliss that should be spent together basking in the glory as the bridge between two minds fully solidified. Nothing could be secret between them anymore, and there was nothing that couldn't be shared: shared emotions from across the room, across the galaxy, even! Shared physical sensations upon touch on top of the shared thoughts, always, an irreversible mating bond that lasted for life, more intimate than even familial bonds.
Heats and ruts, outlawed by the Academy for Time Lords like him, and a thing of the past for all Gallifreyians with modern medicine. Pregnancy and warm milk scented pups, just silly fairy tales, the Loom, the only way of making children in his culture due to the curse, his own freshly loomed children smelt of mud until they developed their individual scents, like all loomed Gallifreyians. Nesting and dens, only permitted within familial homes, and even then, in the Doctor's childhood home, were completely discouraged. The Doctor had wondered as a kid if his species had been different in the days of old.
The carnal desires he experienced, the desire to mark, to claim, to have and hold someone as his own.
Gallifreyians just repressed everything.
The Doctor’s whole life, he had been taught to repress everything that made him, him.
Just a few hours later, bites still fresh and their unknown mating bond only just beginning to take hold, and she was gone.
Trapped beyond the void.
Bliss was completely eclipsed by the drowning grief of longing and the constant aching pain of heartbreak. When they had finally been reunited after she had been searching for so long, dimension by dimension, universe by universe, he blindly ran towards her, drawn towards her, focused only on her, and he was shot by that Dalek, right in front of her.
In that moment, Rose felt, with her gut filled with dread, as the part of him she had become so accustomed to feeling living inside of herself while searching for him for years through the alternate dimensions, feeling his presence nestled quietly right in the back of her mind as if he still had them slightly telepathically connected through the distance of the void, go completely silent. Then he was regenerating right in front of her, again.
Until he wasn’t.
He had healed himself and unintentionally started the process of creating the metacrisis, but the regeneration energy had dulled his senses once again, and he couldn’t smell her or feel their bond.
There’s a safety mechanism, ingrained into a Time Lord’s biology during their time at the Academy concerning bonds and regeneration, the human Doctor had explained. Merciful in practice, but selfish in design. Any bonds a Time Lord had, even the surface-level causal ones, meaning familial or otherwise, would break and go dormant during a regeneration, so that no one connected with them on that deeper level, nor anyone in the entire matrix with a causal bond, nobody would feel their pain or emotions as they died and regenerated if they happened to be close enough to touch.
Since Time Lords are touch telepaths and bounce around in time, their deeper bonds wouldn’t be fully reconnected until true skin-to-skin contact with the bondmate was established, deliberate touch with the pure intent of reconnecting using telepathy, if and only if both were synced up in the right time, in the proper timeline. The Doctor hadn't re-bonded with much of his family after his first regeneration.
But the Doctor’s regeneration energy-plagued senses were once again dulled and couldn’t smell as her pheromones desperately cried out for him. In the middle of the crisis and the literal end of reality as they knew it, Rose didn’t get the chance to have a moment alone with him to ask what was going on inside her.
He didn’t know what he was leaving behind in that alternate universe.
They barely even got the chance to brush hands in the middle of Davro’s plan.
Her human Doctor stayed with her on the other Earth, yes. Well… he was left there with her. But her human Doctor was exactly that, human. He didn’t have the same rainstorm scent, didn’t have the same instincts or even the same biology, and he wasn’t the one bonded with Rose.
He did have the scar on the junction of his shoulder that she had left on him, proper him, with her slightly sharpened omega fangs, and that caused a breakdown and her to lock herself away for weeks. The love and care she felt for the human Doctor was just not the same.
They lived together and braved this new world together, but Rose kept her distance. How could she not? He wasn’t hers. They only shared a bed when the loneliness and despair of the night were so overwhelming and all-consuming that only the touch of someone who knew, someone who understood what she was going through to hold her, would help dry her tears.
A broken bond. He had plenty of experience with that. Even now, as a human, never having had a single bond in his life, he remembered the pain of what it felt like as the millions of bonds in his mind left all at the same moment, familial or casual, his whole entire species.
He tried, oh how he tried, to make up for everything that she had lost, that the full Time Lord him had taken from her, but sometimes she just couldn’t stand to see the face of the man she loved and had bonded with on someone who felt so foreign.
He had loved her with all his heart, but that wasn’t enough.
She loved another with all of hers.
An egg timer dinged, breaking the stillness in the room and pulling Rose out of her memories. She jolted and gasped, scrunching up her face towards the ceiling.
Broken from her spell, she inched a hand forward and lightly stroked the envelope, just making sure it was really there. Her ship buzzed mockingly in the back of her head again in what felt like a very pointed eye roll. Rose grabbed the mail, careful to only grab it by the edges, and inched it towards her. That beautiful deep blue, the color of a perfectly painted clear night sky, and her name, written by her Doctor.
She didn’t think she could be any happier at this moment.
Slowly, she turned the envelope around, looking at the back, a circle, carefully drawn in that same silver ink. A zero? A whatever just a single circle in Galifreyan meant, a J, an M? A period mark?
She closed her eyes and brought the envelope to her nose, inhaling deeply. It smelled like him. Standing outside in the middle of a raging thunderstorm, hot rain dripping down your skin, soaking you to the bone, lightning burning bright across the sky, warm, wet, and wild. The Oncoming Storm. It smelled like home.
Okay, guess she could be happier at this moment.
Forcing herself away from the scent so as not to get lost in it like she so desperately wanted to, she began her mission of opening the envelope.
One fraction at a time, Rose peeled away an edge of the fold of the envelope, mindful not to tear a single rip in the beautiful paper. With just a fingernail, she tugged the flap loose, lifting it and sliding her finger underneath the fold. Inch by inch, she slid her finger across the adhesive until the envelope was finally open and the paper hung loosely over her knuckle.
The scent of the storm was suddenly so much clearer, and she looked down, surprised by her own hand so close to her face. The finger that had opened the envelope was ghosting across her bottom lip.
Her mate .
Her Doctor had licked the envelope closed.
She could almost taste him.
Letting out a stuttered breath, she steeled herself and opened the envelope, barely holding in a sob when she saw the letter inside, hormones going wild at just the thought of her mate after so long. Rose grabbed the folded piece of parchment inside and eased it out, gently discarding the envelope on the table in front of her.
A single piece of paper, taken from a yellow legal pad. She could see the black ink bleeding through from the inside.
Rose unfolded the paper with the same reverence she had given to the envelope. Gasping as a card fell out from where it had been carefully folded into the middle.
That same wonderful blue, this time on an index card, flipping it over, she saw that it made a border around the smaller white card that had been pasted onto the center of it. Rose wondered if he had pulled out his typewriter to make this, as she gazed at the inked-on message.
‘22/04/2011
17:00 MDT
12-689-777-*-7-920-D6D64-T-T-13-001-Crimson-11-Petrichor-Delight’
Written underneath, in that beautiful looping chickenscratch, ‘Come back to me again, my precious pink and yellow Rose. Please.’
It was signed with two meticulously drawn cartoon hearts.
Rose shook as she read over the lines, hot tears streaking her face once again. Coordinates. Those were the coordinates to his TARDIS. HER TARDIS. Their home. She recognized the base code and even the psychic password phrases, so similar to the ones ingrained into her mind for her own TARDIS, and a manic giggle bubbled past her lips.
She could finally go home. She had spent years, and years, and years trying to figure out a way to get back home.
To her Doctor.
And it was as simple as that? A letter in the mail?
Long ago, the human copy had explained that the only way back to her world would be through connecting with the original TARDIS and pulling their way through the void using the barely there bond between mother and daughter, as all the rips in the fabric of the universe had been closed and healed.
He told her that the second the damage was repaired from the invasion, they were trapped in this universe for the long haul until the new TARDIS was grown.
The coordinates to the TARDIS in her home universe were nearly impossible to figure out. Even setting the scanners to look for her mother the second the new TARDIS was ready, it would take years, millennia maybe, for them to connect through the void, especially since the baby never had the chance to properly bond with her mother while in the universe that they both belonged to.
Simply put, they would never be able to figure out the 11th-dimensional baseline codes that would have shifted as soon as the cracks closed, or the TARDIS matrix password that is and only ever would be unique to the one that bonded with her, her pilot. The human copy just didn’t know; he wasn’t linked to the TARDIS, never was.
It had broken him to see her so hopeless, and it was all his fault.
Then the years passed, and he began to grow grey, and wrinkles started to decorate his face. It broke him once again, even harder, because she hadn’t aged a day, and he couldn't give her the happiness or the forever that she so deserved.
He helped her, the best he could.
Checking in on the budding TARDIS coral as she grew with Rose daily and coaching Rose as she navigated their new psychic bond as ship and pilot, and so much more.
Writing down every single word that he could remember from the instruction manual that he had so carelessly thrown out. Filling an entire library with the knowledge he thought she’d need. He taught Rose everything he could think of that would help her. But by the time the baby TARDIS was ready to fly, by the time they could even begin to forge the bond with the original TARDIS across the void and start to consider going home as a potential future idea, he, too, had left her.
Scrubbing her cheeks with her free hand, she sniffed. She could go home. She could be with her Doctor again. Her mate. Forever. Finally. One last tear broke free and rolled down her face as she set the card down and picked up the letter.
Tears started again by the end of the first two words.
‘My Rose,
In my hearts, I don’t even truly think this letter will ever reach you. I know I’ve lost you, and that it’s my own fault. I want you to know that I am always looking for a way to find you. I found a crack in the universe. I had to seal that one, but the multi-form that came through said “cracks”, that the universe is cracked. Where there is one, there are bound to be more, the way trouble finds us, and I figured it was worth a shot. I am looking for you, Rose Tyler. I just
I regret
You are the sole owner of my hearts. I thought time would heal me, but every day I painfully miss you more than the last, and every time I sleep, I dream of you. In my dreams, you’re still here, and I am a different me every time, and sometimes a mix of all of them. We sail the stars, running hand in hand, getting in trouble together for the rest of our days. Rose Tyler and the Doctor in the TARDIS, where they belong. I miss you more than anything in the universe, in any universe. I miss your sweet smile, I miss your intoxicating scent, and how your hand fit perfectly in mine, no matter which me I was. I miss showing you new places and the look of awe in your eyes. I miss Jack popping in, dragging us around, and your precious wicked grin. I miss curling up in the library together after our adventures and counting your breaths as you slept peacefully in my lap.
I never told you, but you smell like bananas and honey and warm golden sunshine. I can still remember it so clearly to this day. My own personal tropical paradise. You are an oasis and I am a man starved. I need What I wouldn’t give to hold you one last time.
I never thought I deserved love until you gave me yours so freely. I was so broken and so lost when we met, ready to give up, ready to die. When I first grabbed your hand and we ran, I tried to push you away. But you came back, you always came back . You showed me, grumpy, stubborn old me, that the stars could shine bright once again and that my hearts could sing with joy and love that burned hotter than a hundred thousand billion suns, you showed me that I could let people in again, and it would be alright. You saved me in more ways than one. Your beautiful eyes, filled with care and wonder and so much love, and you saw me, and for some reason, you loved me. You terrify me, Rose Tyler, because how am I supposed to live without ever running hand in hand with you for the rest of my days? I should never have
I live for you, Rose Tyler. I breathe for you. I ache for you. Every day, I carry on because I know if I didn’t, you’d be first in line, if the universe were so kind, to slap me not into the next regeneration but into the next afterlife.
The only hope that I have left, the only thing I believe in, is you. That you’ve found your forever with the other me. That you've had the chance to dance at one more wedding with me him. That you’ve found the love that you deserve and had the one adventure we could never have together, the same forever.
I am sorry that I took away your home, abandoned you, but you deserve forever with someone who’s forever matches your own, and a life with Jackie and Mickey, your family. I hope that you can find family in Pete and Tony. I hope that you enjoy your forever there with them, despite the fact that I will selfishly spend the rest of mine looking for a way to rip you out of it and bring you home to me, or cross the void and find you. I'm sorry. I miss you, Rose. I am selfish and greedy and awful, and I miss you so, so much, it hurts.
We promised each other, and Rose Tyler, and I will always love you for the rest of my forever.
Yours,
Past, present, and future. Until the stars go out again, and once more in the next life. Any face, any me, only you.
Forever
P.S. Jack is still mad at me because he didn’t get the chance to properly say goodbye to you. I am a bloody stupid idiot, and an arse, and everything else he's called me, I know. His right hook is even worse than your mother’s slap.’
“Oh, that cheesy sod,” Rose gasped out as the tears finally ran dry. She hadn’t felt anything in so long, isolating herself from the pain of the universe, the pain within herself. It was safer not to feel anything than to feel everything. But now? With this? It all came pouring into her at once, but above anything, she felt hope.
Hope that she could finally go home.
All around her, the kitchen leaped into an array. The kettle started whistling, and the cupboard door opened, with her favorite mug front and center. Toast jumped out of the toaster with a ding, suddenly, perfectly golden and waiting for her.
“Okay, sweetheart, you’re right. Guess it's tea and nibbles, then we can get ready to fly home,” Rose spoke aloud as she stood from her chair and headed to fetch her mug.
Lights flickered again, the radio on top of the fridge turned on to a cheerful song, and the buzzing in the back of her head sang golden for just a moment along with the lyrics, dancing in time with her rapidly beating heart.
Grinning, Rose waltzed around the kitchen, grabbing the jam as she spoke, “Excellent job, baby! You sang so clearly for a bit! Must like Whitney then, eh? Or is somebody excited?” she teased, sitting back down at the table and enjoying the company of her TARDIS. Smiling down at that beautiful blue envelope, resting a hand over her stomach, Rose sighed, content and happy, excited for the first time in a long time.
Oh, I wanna dance with somebody-
With somebody who loves me.