Title: The Stuff of Legends
Rating: T
Notes: Rose/tenth Doctor
Spoiler warning: Through Doomsday.
Disclaimer: Yeah, sure, they're mine. 'Cos I really look like the Beeb.
She doesn't sleep.
She is too afraid of her dreams and her nightmares – visions, almost – to sleep. She lays in her bed in her father's house – only not her father, not really, and they all dance around that issue, seeming to be afraid to tip her over the edge of the precipice she is perpetually hovering on.
She knows what she will face in the darkest hours of the night, so she doesn't sleep.
She throws herself into her work – within months she has been appointed as head of this version of Torchwood, and she is making a difference.
She remembers the words of her Doctor. She must have a fantastic life, for him.
It tastes like ash in her mouth, and everyone knows it is pretence. The TARDIS key hangs around her neck like an albatross.
She meets aliens that she knows from her own dimension, and she knows how to deal with them thanks to him. She meets Harriet Jones, and tells her in no uncertain terms that Torchwood is there to protect the world, not just the interests of England. The dangerous look in her eyes is enough to make the President back off.
She works long into the night, drinking coffee and other caffeine-laden drinks to keep herself awake. When she crashes from exhaustion, she dreams and cries out and wakes herself up. Her juniors at Torchwood worry about her, and often she finds things on her desk meant to help with sleeping.
She puts the items in a drawer and shuts them away. If she sleeps, she dreams of him, and it hurts too much.
She goes to Bad Wolf Bay as often as she can. She finds it peaceful there, and the name reminds her of her Doctor. She is Bad Wolf because of him.
When they engineer their first truly interstellar craft – using bits of alien technologies that they have found or traded for – she goes on the first real trip. Just to Mars and back, it takes only two days. She returns to find her mother hysterical, deathly afraid for her.
People ask her on dates, sometimes. She is so much thinner than she used to be, but she is still beautiful, and men are still attracted to her. She refuses them all gently, and Mickey takes care of any who are more insistent.
Her half-brother – not a real brother, because this Pete is not her real father and they all know it – has ruddy hair like his father, and Jackie's eyes. She cannot bear to look at him sometimes, because this child will have what she did not. Two parents, a stable and loving family to care for him.
This child will never know the wonder of stepping onto an alien world and knowing he is the first human to ever walk on the soil, the ice, the grass.
Sometimes she fills her bath tub and holds herself under the water until she has to breach the surface, gasping for air.
She dresses in dark clothes – gone are the pinks, reds and blues of before. She is mourning, and she doesn't care if the entire universe knows it.
One day, walking down a corridor in Torchwood with the head of the science department, they round a corner and she screams at the graffiti on the wall. Soldiers come running, fearing an attack. Jake almost runs into her in his concern. He leads her away, holding her tightly to prevent the violent shudders that wrack her body.
Bad Wolf.
She sits in her room for days after that, filling up pages and pages of paper with those two words. Bad Wolf. Bad Wolf. Bad Wolf. Bad Wolf.
Mickey and Jake – lovers now – come and try to pull her back into reality. She screams at them, screams at Mickey that he doesn't understand. Jackie comes, new baby on her hip, and she can't do anything but cry. Pete comes, her dad-not-dad, and she remembers how it felt when her father died to save the world. He had been her hero then.
She returns to Torchwood something harder – compounded by fate and circumstance into something akin to a diamond. Indomitable, beautiful, valuable. Hard and cold and remorseless.
She negotiates treaties and watches technologies be put into use. She holds press conferences and plays with her half-brother.
She goes to Bad Wolf Bay often, and sometimes she screams at the world, the cruel place that denies her what she needs.
They dig up the shell of a Dalek one day – a team of archaeologists stumble across it while digging in Surrey. She orders everyone out of the room and stands, staring at the metal skin of her enemy, for almost hours. Then Mickey comes and drags her away.
She refuses to authorise research on the technology of the Dalek – she destroys it the only way she knows how. The way she didn't know she could do.
They grow scared of her, of her gaunt features and her power and the way she knows things that she shouldn't. They shy away from her, not meeting her eyes. She prefers it that way. She knows he would disapprove, but he isn't here, and she can't live the way he taught her.
She watches the sky at night and sees the birth of stars and the destruction of galaxies. Somewhere, somewhen, in some dimension, he is there.
She sleeps sometimes now, but still only when she cannot help but collapse from sheer exhaustion. In her dreams his hands caress her. His voice sounds in her ears until all else is drowned out.
She finds a police box in a small town in Yorkshire, and she leaves her team and guards, running up to it, hammering her fists against the door, crying because there is no hum, there is no energy or life in this police box. Sometimes a police box is just a police box.
Pete tries to talk to her, tries to make friends, and she tells him in a harsh, flat voice that her father is dead. He died to save the universe, and to be a hero for her. She tells him that he isn't her father, and never will be.
Jackie shouts at her for that.
She takes a blade to her wrists once. She is found before she can bleed out, and they make her see doctors and counsellors. She tells them nothing, because what can she say? She takes a leave of absence from Torchwood, and goes to stay in a cottage in Norway, near what she has come to think of as her beach, her bay.
She sleeps on the beach, wrapped up in a sleeping bag, and she dreams of golden light.
She wakes up, and it is two years since she saw him. Broken-hearted, she sits on the sand, too frozen inside to cry. She waits. He will be coming. He must be coming, because she cannot live like this.
She exists like this for days. Sometimes she cries, sometimes she screams, but mostly she is a silent shadow, a remnant of her self.
Then one day she steps sideways. A simple action. Something she knows she will never regret, as somehow the remnants of the time vortex inside her cause her to step from one dimension into another.
She keeps her eyes closed. She cannot believe this is real, even as the familiar sound of the engines reaches her ears, as well as voices.
She opens her eyes. He is there. Arguing with a woman, dark-skinned and with an accent similar to her own. He has been crying, she sees, although he has tried to hide it. She whispers his name, and he doesn't hear her, so busy trying to convince his new companion and himself – oh, he is there – that he is alright.
She says his name again, and the argument stops. He turns, unbelieving, and she cries. He steps towards her, touches her, hands frantically roving over every part of her. And now he is crying to, and asking how.
She does not know. All she knows is that the misery is over, the heartache is over. Never again will she have to see her not-father, and her mother who has become someone else, and her half-brother, and her friend Mickey who tries so hard and fails so badly.
She stumbles, and golden energy pours from her mouth, and this time she knows the vortex is gone forever. For better or worse.
"You're stuck with me," she whispers.
"I love you," he says.
She sleeps now. Content in his arms, the nightmares are gone. She dreams sometimes, of that other place that seems such a distant memory now. She remembers her half-brother, and she remembers her mother and Mickey. She remembers the pain.
Bad Wolf still follows her through space and time, but with her Doctor she is safe. They are invincible.
The stuff of legends.
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