My Rosary

When he is dead, and she is long since gone, he goes back for her – back to the very day she was born. She is born on a Monday in May, and a song she played once rings in his head (Monday's child is fair of face fair of face of face of face). He is there when she is cast naked upon the Earth, still and dead, and he is the one who massages life in to her lungs with knowing, skillful fingers.

Because he has touched her before. And with God as his witness, he would touch her again.

Her first breath fills her, and he smiles as he watches her lithe form expand, until it is no longer a still born, but a baby, full of life.

He is the one who gives her her first kiss, on her fair brow. His favorite spot to kiss her.

“She’ll live.” He tells Jackie Tyler, and shares a cigar with her father.

“Thank you.” Jackie says to him, for maybe the only time. When she takes her child – his precious Rose, fair of face fair of face – she smiles warmly in a way he has never seen Jackie Tyler smile before. But then her brows draw together, and she looks at him as if she is unsure of something. “Wait a tick. . . who are you?” she asks, and he knows that now she is certain that he doesn’t belong.

He isn’t sure what tipped her off, but he knows that she is a clever, clever woman, who made a clever, clever girl.

Fair of face, Monday’s child, his rosary, his Rosary. . .

“I’m just. . . the Doctor.” He answers, as honestly as he possibly can.

And then her father puts her in his arms, and then he finally feels whole again.

She is four the next time he sees her, with a bum knee and a scratch on her cheek and that defiant glint is in her eyes. He feels as though he has done something wrong.

“I shouldn’t talk to strangers.” She tells him in a just-so manner, and then that pretty pink tongue is caught in between her teeth.

He reaches out to her, and musses her hair a bit. “But don’t you remember?” He asks her as his gaze meets hers. “We’ve met before.” He assures her with soft eyes and a softer smile.

She doesn’t remember, but that doesn’t really matter all that much to him.

“How’s your mother?” He asks, and feels a bit awkward at having to break the ice with a four year old. But it pays off when she puts her little hand in his.

He looks down at her, and sees the same expression her mother gave him the day she was born – brows drawn together in obvious confusion, as if something was just wrong and she just didn’t know what it was. “She cries.” She admitted. Stopping, that confused look seems to transform – in to one of shameless curiosity. “Why is that?”

That’s the Rose he knows. The one who tries to figure things out. The one who doesn’t accept the obvious answers.

Her entirety seems to be put in to that one question, and the Doctor knows why. He knows because sometimes. . .

“Her heart is broken.” He tells her in his quiet, Northern voice. “And when people are broken, they leak tears.” It seemed the simplest answer.

It seemed the most honest one she could hear.

“And. . . you’re a Doctor, right?” The look she gives him is one he has seen before, when she is much, much older, so he knows what is coming next even before she does. “So then. . . you can fix her?” It seems more a plea than a question.

“No.” the Doctor answers with a hushed whisper and a heavy sigh. “I don’t know how to fix that particular ailment.”

“Oh.” She says, accepting this answer because, after all, he is the authority on such adult matters. But one thing wont stop bothering her. . . “How do you know about it, then?”

“Because. . .” The Doctor grabs her then, and spins her high in to the air before pulling her in to him, so that she is pressed up against him in such a manner that she won’t be for what seems a millennia to the Time Lord. And his face is wet at the dip of her neck when he takes in a deep breath of her, and answers.

“Because I’m broken too.”

On the day she receives her first kiss, he knows that he is torturing himself, for he is immortal, and she is only immortal in her own little slice of time.

Her delicate, pale form is as Rosy as her namesake, and she sighs out a name. “Oh, Doctor. . .” His name.

On another man’s lips.

The boy withdraws, as if physically slapped, and his face holds an expression of utter bewilderment. But his shock is nothing compared to Rose’s. And from his vantage point, on the landing above theirs, the Doctor can see the words ‘BAD WOLF’ forming delicately at her feet, like mists unfolding before her.

And the Doctor can almost hear her tinkling laughter ringing down through the ages.

It soothes him. It leads him back to her.

Since she looks older than she really is, and since he looks far younger than he actually is, it is socially acceptable when the handsome young man who calls himself Blaidd Drwg (she’s butchers the pronunciation first, the spelling later) and he asks her to Prom.

And since he is so handsome, and is studying to become a Doctor, she accepts with a ready smile and a demur kiss.

And for the first time in a long time, he thinks he is perfectly happy.

Especially when, the night of the Prom, she pulls him in for a heady kiss and asks if his parents are home.

The urge to laugh is surprisingly weaker than he would have imagined, but since his throat is dry and his blood is rushing, he is surprised that he answers her at all.

Naturally, he pays for the finest Hotel Room in London.

Poet’s fingers, long and narrow, play her like an instrument as they deftly remove stays and hooks. He touches her here, a sigh, and there, a moan. Her skin blushes a pale pink and he thinks again that she was so aptly named, and he loses himself somewhere inside of her.

When she wakes up in the morning, he is already gone.

The next time, she sees him before he sees her, and she pulls her fist back and hauls off, and he feels the warmth of blood spilling out his nose.

“You used me, you creep!” She cries, pushing hard against him, “You used me and then you left me!”

The Doctor barely resists the overwhelming urge to correct her. That he didn’t leave her. That she left him. But he does find it in himself to resist, and he grabs her and holds her to him (even though she struggles, it’s all he knows how to do anymore. . .), and wishes with all his being that he could explain.

“Rose. . .” He begins.

“I believe she asked you to leave.” Ricky or Mickey, he could never really remember which it was, wraps himself around her and pulls her away.

He always is pulling her away!

Ignoring the searing jealous rage that burns its way inside of him, the Doctor turns away, content with the knowledge that Ricky would eventually be cast aside in his shadow, and was grateful that he hadn’t admitted (and ruined) everything. . .

He lingers near her until he hears the TARDIS.

When she travels, he doesn’t follow. This, he decides, is her journey. Hers. . . and his.

And he is willing to wait forever for her.

While fighting the Cybermen, and fighting the Daleks, and fighting each other, and while his pretty Rose is distracted, he uses his own transporter.

The walls between the universes have fallen, and his dinky little transporter will not leave enough residue to alert them that some one has done something that they really, really shouldn’t have.

“Rose Tyler.” He watches himself tell her with a heavy heart. “I. . .” and then the picture fails, and then he can not see.

And then she falls to her knees and cries. . .

“Why!?” She screams, her sobs wet and echoing against the ocean by her side. She beats at the soft sand at her knees until her hands are raw, and her arms are heavy. “Why couldn’t he just have said it?”

It was then that he came to her . . . on the shores of BAD WOLF Bay, the rise of the sun at his back lighting up his Ginger hair like an aura.

Ignoring the curious protests of her companions (Wait a tick. . . I’ve seen you before!) he kneels at Rose’s side, and prays.

“I Love You, Rose Tyler.” He says then, because he has waited so long to say it, and wraps his long arms around her.

She turns, startled, and recognition fades to astonishment fades to realization. “It was you. . .” she chokes out, barely, before his mouth claims hers for his own.

The hours for explaining would come, he knows, and the years of lonely wandering as well.

But he knows that the pain will subside -eventually- with out her by his side. . . but no amount of pain would ever be worth not being with her at all.