Chapter 1 - When You Wake and Find Me Gone

‘Oh but your heart grows cold. A north wind blows, and carries down the distant.. Rose?’

‘Oh, big mistake! Because that name keeps me fighting!’
A red head in a wedding dress jumping from a moving car to a flying blue box on a busy motor way. A giant alien face, suspended in a gaseous liquid inside a glass case, attended by a nurse with the face of a cat. The hoovervilles and slums of Manhattan, being brutally attacked by flying metal salt and pepper shakers - the daleks again. Armies of scarecrow men, a green light and a golden fob watch. Familiar stone statues of weeping angels.

‘Her name was Rose. And she is not dead, she is very much alive, now jump!’

---

Rolling over on her comfortable pink bed, Rose saw her doctor suspended in a beautiful iridescent aura of light. She saw it in her minds eye, feeling his very power course through her, although she was unable to tell if she was asleep or awake, whether she was really there in that same place as her doctor or just imagining his presence. Every so often she would dream of an adventure that she had no part in. She would get flashes clear as day of experiences that didn’t belong to her, felt feelings she had no reason to feel, remembered certain doctors that she’d rather forget.

He was trapped in an alternate universe - Rose reminded herself of this every morning when she got up, and every evening when she went to bed. As Jackie kept reminding her, there was no point on dwelling on the past, it’s the future that matters.

All the same, Rose couldn’t get past the feeling that her doctor wasn’t as far away as they all believed. It was a fact that they couldn’t be together, it would be physically impossible, so Rose tried to shut out these thoughts about him. She tried to stop, honestly. Working at Torchwood didn’t help, though. Everyday she was confronted with some alien artefact or other and was expected to carry on as though she wasn’t reminded of him. It was painful.

This particular dream had been a lot more vivid than the rest. She had almost felt his energy, could still hear his voice ringing in her ears as she woke up in a cold sweat “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”. It was him, she knew it. But the apology wasn’t meant for her, it was meant for ‘the master’ she recalled vaguely. Something to do with the Toclafane and the year that never was. It was so frustrating to know that her doctor was out there, fighting the fight, day after day, without her. Every morning she woke to find him gone.

In an effort to avoid this morning melancholy, Rose decided to take on as much as physically possible, as a means to distract herself. And so, on an early November morning 2007 she packed her bags for a voyage on the QE3 - she was going to New York.