Rose Tyler

You Are 8: The Challenger

You're brave, impulsive, and gutsy - loving challenges. You act first and think later. And you're not afraid to speak up. You are confident, so much so that you can be a bit bossy at times. Whether people like it or not, you always stand up for yourself. At Your Best: You are heroic, courageous, and ready to change the rules of the world. A true leader and inspiration. At Your Worst: You intimidate, fight, or threaten to get your way. And you won't back down. Your Fixation: Lust Your Primary Fear: Being harmed or controlled Your Primary Desire: To be independent and self sufficient Other Number 8's: Donald Trump, Courtney Love, Pablo Picasso, Fidel Castro, and Rosie O'Donnell.

I think I'm in questionable company. Except Picasso, I suppose - I don't really know what his personality was like. We should do something about that.

I'm not bossy, am I? Really?

Not that I think it's likely, but if anyone needs Rose for anything for the next ten days, I'm going to be pretty scarce due to being in a different country than usual. I am reachable by email, though, if need be: frozen.illyria @ gmail.com, and may even sneak onto AIM some nights.

See y'all when I get back!

[Hey all. Rose is tenatively back around again in the general RP'verse, though I'm entirely out of the practice of writing her. Here's where you can drop me a note if you'd like to pick up old plots with her, thread anything in particular, or other administrative-detail type stuff. She's no longer in theatrical_muse but she'll still RP with anyone, and I'm dropping her back into a few other old haunts. Comments? Questions? Random meta-spam? Hit me!]

[Am back from hiatus, but getting over illness so may be a little slow in actually catching up, but I am here and catching up on prompts as we speak.]

This is for theatrical_muse, officially, but I'm on hiatus everywhere at the moment. This is just to say that, due to the fact that I am getting married in a little over a month, and the stress is just about killing me, I won't be writing Rose til the second week in January. Hope you all have a lovely holiday, and if Rose's presence needs to be assumed by anyone she's closely involved with, you've got my permission.

Expect Rose to be back in full force and better than ever post-wedding/holiday season.

You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, 'Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.' Now how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping Madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll--then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that their might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

***

For all that she never doubted any of those who claimed to love her, romantically, platonically, and those odd cases somewhere in between, Rose sometimes wondered how it was that no one ever called her on the things she knew she did wrong. The truth was, sometimes she could as selfish as anyone, as jealous, as unable to be as understanding as this life required of her. Some days she questioned her own sanity, namely how she'd kept it for as long as she had. For all that she found it easy to love him, the truth was that Byron was not an easy man to love. And the Doctor was... the Doctor, and though they'd both given their hearts to another, there were those little unwilling pieces that couldn't truly be given at will. Sometimes she thought she somehow did them both a disservice by not being able to be somehow more than she was.

As much as she seemed it, Rose was not perfectly understanding. When Byron wasn't with her, she didn't try to guess at where he was, because that line of thought led nowhere good. But she wasn't stupid, blind, or naive. He hadn't lied to her about his nature, about who he was, and she didn't truly think she was going to change him. She was one mortal girl out of who knew how many others, and though he'd set her apart by choosing to marry her, there were times when she truly resented the imbalance inherent in their relationship. She was all his but he'd never be all hers, not even if she'd thought to try to impose rules upon him. She never would; so long as they didn't exist, they couldn't be broken. It was almost selfish, the way she protected herself, though she was fairly certain he never guessed at her reasoning. Aislinn likely did, and though they never spoke of it, it helped Rose to know that someone else had been at this game a lot longer, was more used to the delicate balance. Every time Rose thought, even for a moment, that she couldn't stand it any more, she reminded herself that she had more control over her emotions than a bloody faerie. It was unkind, but it helped her cope. Surely a small private unkind thought was worth it in the end.

Anything was worth it to keep this life. That's the decision she'd come to years ago, even before she and the Doctor were separated. Even before she truly had to leave her old life entirely behind. That, too, had been a selfish choice: at times thoughts of her parents truly hurt, because however attractive the alternative, the truth was that she'd abandoned them without much of a second thought. There was a brother she'd never know. Her parents would grow old and die one day, and she would never know it. She wouldn't be there to say her last goodbyes. Her mother would miss her for all of her days, and hold out hope that she would see her daughter again, because she'd seen the impossible enough times for hope to always remain an option. Rose knew this and felt guilty for it, but never enough to wish she'd chosen differently. The Doctor had needed her; she'd convinced herself of that so that it would seem less selfish than the reverse option. The truth was, she was fairly certain the Doctor would've moved on just fine; she was the one unwilling to let it go. And for what? Sometimes she thought her presence did more harm than good. He, too, would grieve her one day, and she wondered if she were setting two people up for heartbreak by her unwillingness to stop loving either.

Perhaps one day one of them would notice. Perhaps they already had, and made their own allowances for her. She was young, she was mortal; those characteristics served her well as often as not. Maybe one day they wouldn't, and the other shoe would fall. Or maybe it never would, because none of these small crimes made her any different from any other human who had ever loved. They only made her human.

I wish he could've stayed.

Peter Allen Tyler narrowly missed being struck by a car while crossing the street on the way to a friend's wedding. For years after Jackie would tell the story of how the stupid lunk nearly got himself killed, and Pete would laugh it off with some retort or other about the tongue-lashing he got that day and how some days he thought Jackie hadn't finished telling him off for it yet. Rose only smiled at the memory of having grown up hearing it, because sometimes she half-remembered it the other way, too. Wishes didn't cause paradoxes, but apparently this one left an echo, traces of gratitude that she mightn't have otherwise had.

He lived to be 76 years old, and died without ever having been made filthy rich by his schemes, but the three of the never had much cause to complain. They'd had a good life together.

I wish he could've stayed.

One wish was all it took to undo the Bad Wolf. She couldn't bring him back without undoing what had been done, and she couldn't unwrite that without unwriting all of it. The Time Vortex closed in on itself and dissipated all at once; no longer harnessed by the last TARDIS, the natural order of things was returned. The Time Lords had never been meant to hold her forever. (Of course Time was female, the Doctor replied when Rose asked him about the phrasing he chose. But when she pressed him on the issue he only shook his head and smiled that giant ear-to-ear grin and told her it wasn't anything she needed to worry about.) His function stripped of him, the Doctor would've been aimless, but he couldn't feel the lack of something that eventually, as they got further away in time and in space (the way humans do), wasn't so much lost as gently written out of his story. He could still feel it, but it was around him now instead of inside him, and she always thought he looked a bit happier for it for all he looked sad at times, too.

He never complained to her, though. They had a fantastic life together, more than she'd even wished for.

I wish he could've stayed.

As it turned out, this universe had a Doctor, too. He wore a different face, ginger, this time, and she knew him the instant she met him.

As it turned out, this Doctor had a machine that would grant wishes; not really, he explained, but it would alter the fabric of time in such convoluted ways as to leave a seamless connection, no chance of paradoxes or holes.

"You've gotten better at this," she pointed out, and he just winked at her and turned a few dials, and before she could say thank you, she was standing back on her own side of the Void (still safely sealed), and he turned from the wall, mouth agape to ask her how.

And before she could say thank you, she was standing there in the TARDIS, aglow with joy alone and nothing more, watching her Doctor open his eyes to stare at her and ask her how.

And before she could say thank you, she was at home with her mum and dad, and a man who would never meet her looked up at her window and silently wondered without knowing quite what he was wondering how.

Muse: Rose Tyler
Fandom: Doctor Who
Words: 571

She was forty-one, and thanks to whatever the Time Vortex had done before she let it go, she looked ten years younger, at least. Jackie was jealous, though thanks to alien technological advances she and her daughter were, much to Rose's horror, occasionally taken for sisters.

She'd left off wearing all that awful mascara some years back, at the recommendation of the man she eventually married. His name had been John, but he was Jack to his friends. Neither Doctor nor Captain, he reminded her nonetheless a little of them both. They were married for six years before he, too, was lost to her. A hazard of working for Torchwood; and this time she had no Time Vortex to will him back to life.

She wasn't sure it ever stopped hurting, but she didn't try again for forever. It didn't exist; twenty years had taught her that.

***

She was forty-one and finally starting to look it, much to her surprising relief. He'd regenerated a few years older, this time, more along the lines of his Ninth incarnation, and she secretly found the slightly older incarnations more attractive than the young, slightly manic one, though she never did tell him that. After all, there was no telling what he'd be next time; perhaps when she was sixty he'd look twenty three and she'd change her last name to Robinson, and then she'd be the one fielding either knowing or disapproving looks from the more puritanical populations.

They never actually married; there wasn't much need, and any and all conversations about it tended to end in awkward silences and changes of subject until they both just stopped trying and accepted that they were what they were. Discussions of forever tended to break down when they considered actual logistics. They had a time machine, but if she wanted to give him forever she'd have had to stay behind, where she could go on existing and he could pop in from time to time.

She chose to be selfish, and took forever for herself, instead. Maybe it wasn't a fair trade, but she couldn't help but think he never seemed to mind.

***

She was forty-one, and most of those years showed only in a certain set of her eyes, too many years of narrowing them or frowning in consternation at being forever unable to quite reach her husband in that place where Immortal Poet Rockstars sometimes went. Those lines were balanced by the ones that formed when she smiled, which was truly just as often. He'd tried her patience, made her cry more times than she ever let on, but she never even had to think to ask herself whether or not it was worth it; she knew without hesitation that it was.

They'd parted ways with the Doctor for a time, because children, she argued, oughtn't be raised aboard a time machine. She still wasn't certain whether she'd like to throttle or kiss that Doctor friend of Byron's who'd tipped him off to the possibility in the first place; the twins had inherited their mother's energy and their father's temper tantrums. The TARDIS wouldn't have survived their terrible twos.

Now they were back, the children old enough not to chew on or take apart anything that beeped or lit up, though there were a few pranks that had the Doctor swear that he was banning domestics and leaving the lot of them on Arkannis Major if they weren't careful.

Sometimes she remembered that they'd outlive her, all of them, that is if the twins met the ending she couldn't quite decide if she'd rather they did. It seemed brutal, but at least he'd have them after she was gone. At least there'd be something of her left forever.

At least forever was a promise they could give. For them, it existed, and she never was sure if that was good or bad.


[ooc: uses bits of RP canon, and, to the_corsair's mun, please be telling your pup that the last bit is not a suggestion, just a bit of what if. *g*]

Dear Mickey,

I suppose it's no use writing this, not now that you're back on the parallel Earth and there's not any way back there, but I suppose it needed writing all the same.

First off, I'm sorry. Sorry you got pulled into this whole mess without anyone ever asking you if you wanted it. I'm not sorry I went with the Doctor, but I am sorry that you're the one who got left behind. I thought if you could just see for a little while the things that I saw, if you came with us for a while, then you'd get it. I told myself that maybe the Doctor would let you stay, and I think in the end he would've.

But you left us, and you were right to. I wasn't fair to you, and maybe there's not any way I could've been.

I am sorry you're gone, though. That I won't be able to stop back home any time and see you. That we made you feel like it was a better place for you than with us.

I'm not sorry that you found something as important to you as traveling with the Doctor is to me, though. Because now you understand: there are just some things that are so much bigger than just us.

I miss you, Mickey. Have a fantastic life.

love,

Rose

***


Dear Doctor,

I supppose it's no use writing this, since that goodbye we said seemed pretty final, all things considered. It's pretty stupid to write something like this, since if I ever see you again I'll just think it's too silly to give to you anyway, and end up throwing it away. That's what I did with the letter I wrote to Mickey back when I thought I'd never see him again. It was all just nonsense and sentimental crap, which I'm sure this is going to turn into any minute now.

I'm not even sure what to say. I think I covered all the important bits back there on that beach. It's just...

I keep wondering if there wasn't some other way. If I'd done something different one time, maybe. If I'd held on a little tighter. If you'd jumped across the Void after me. If we'd just come back on a different day, or at a different time.

Sometimes I'm really angry at you, you know. For having a time machine but not being able to jump ahead and see that this would happen. For not being able to turn back time and pick me up again and this time not let us get torn apart that way again. I keep asking myself what use there is in having a time machine if you can't fix the things that really matter to you.

I know it's not fair, and I'm sorry for that, but it's how I feel sometimes. Only sometimes.

The rest of the time I figure I'm lucky enough. Got my parents back, didn't I? And a shiny new job besides. I guess I can forgive you this once for having blown up my old one.

I miss you, Doctor, but I'm trying to do what you told me. I'm trying to have a fantastic life.

love,

Rose.



[ooc: this one, amazingly, is taken entirely from canon, and no RPverse canon applies.]