So a lot of incoming Doctor Who fanfiction apparently? This vaguely drabble-like one was for another birthday. Short and probably pointless, but it did the trick and the friend/forever sister that it was written for enjoyed it.

Disclaimer: No own the characters.

The Scent of Roses and Then

"Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses"

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

"You had to know it," Jeff, a friend Rose had attracted via her charisma almost immediately after landing on the beach, said regretably. "You had to know."

"No," he said trying not to choke on his words. "I… I didn't."

He passed a hand through his hair. Jeff was right, he should have known. He should have been able to put things in order and predicted or anticipated the paths that human lives always, always took.

The problem with him was that he had all of the Doctor's proper memories imbedded in his duplicated brain, but his nerves and brain cells didn't exactly know which information to access all the time so that he could make guesses about commonplace thing ("didn't you think that maybe you should turn the stove off?" was a popular one whenever he'd try his hand at cooking and the fire detector would blare minutes later. Rose would end up kisssing him on the nose and saying 'you're brilliant on Wednesdays, it's okay', and he'd always been rubbish at cooking anyways so it was never that bad). He had gotten better over the years. Really he had, even Jackie said so. Now he came off as distracted more than anything else, which was perfectly alright. But he didn't always… he didn't always think of things that the Doctor himself wouldn't have wanted to think about.

"Well I suppose I did. But the information was burried in the subconscious of the memories cloned from the Doctor and you know what Freud always said about the subconscious: 'it-'''"

"Stop it," Jeff said. "Stop."

And so he did. But he started crying.

It was fantastic, his situation really. Create a boiling mixture of blistering anger, excrutiating sadness and blinding grief and contain it within one unstable, immortal clone. Then add the pain associated with realising for the first time that someone could die (and make that person mean the world to aforementioned clone, and have her whisked away without a warning sign). Not fantastic, really. Fantastic was his word for her, after all.

How selfish of the Doctor to have run off in his blue box and leave him to deal with the flimsy human emotions he'd developed for flimsy humans and their flimsy lives.

That wasn't true at all, of course. But every cruelty is to a mourning man.

The process didn't quite end there. There were more tears of course, and those didn't particularly need a specific trigger. But there were a lot of things that the Doctor didn't quite know and had to be reminded of over the course of the following week- more deep, deep burrials within his borrowed memories. For example: People put flowers on coffins at funerals. You ought to wear black after someone died ("don't ask me why just go-go find something to wear," Jackie said. "She… surely she'd made sure you had something proper in the closet.").

Coffins had to be measured dpending on who was in it (which seemed gruesome although very necessary).

People consoled themselves by sending casseroles over to a grieving household.

Most of these casseroles tasted like cardboard or the local cuisine of Garthoon, or looked like a Dalek without a shell (which couldn't even be reduced to a joke because only one person would have laughed at those jokes). None of these things were particularly pleasant to find out.

Then again, it wasn't as if the week from hell had had a great beginning.

Your first death shouldn't be your first love. That was his conclusion.

Has the Doctor tried to be merciful by stopping his brain from remembering the concept of death before it was time to look it in the eyes? Maybe.

The mercy was not appreciated if so.

So after he acknowledged and absorbed the fact that death was a very real element of most lives, he had to accept it- which of course would take an entire novel to explain, so here's the start of it, a crumb really.

He was at the funeral and trying not to notice the little details that would do him in. Her last box was painted blue. The flowers all around her were, very specifically, not roses despite them being her favourites because out of the rare times where puns were not appropriate, this was one. Everyone was wearing black even though he knew that that wasn't her favourite colour and didn't they all? (Jackie be damned, he should have worn those nice trousers she liked him in and that sweater she'd gotten him). Some people in the benches hadn't spoken to her for ten years even before they'd moved to the parallel dimension. Her little sister had no idea what was going on and he hadn't the slightest idea about how to explain things to Iris or do much except let her sit on his knees or stand on his feet and play with his hands so that she felt like a giant when she walked. She and he were even- both realising right now that good people died for the first time. Jackie, who was usually very, very clear about what she wanted out of the world, was struggling to come off as a clean slate. Pete who always had a plan and an idea looked like a lost puppy who was starting to realise that he should run back home, though he had no idea where that was.

He wondered if anyone was avoiding looking at him because he'd set them off.

He definitely felt as if he shouldn't be at this funeral, listening to this man read words that he'd helped draft. Did he deserve to be here since he'd downright forgotten for a while that Rose Tyler was very human and that she could die even in parallel worlds, even after climbing over odds like some people defy Everest?

They started projecting pictures to a sad song that nobody in the family had picked (or so he thought). Every single image that they had to document Rose in this dimension was on the church wall now. Smiling Rose, Teasing Rose, Rose with Iris, Rose with Jackie, Rose with Jeff and Katie and God knew who else she ran around with, Rose with Pete, Rose with him… Rose on her own laying on a beach, Rose making faces at a camera or baking with her little sister, Rose trying out bridesmaid dresses with Nelly, Rose with chickadees and puddles of bird feed in her palms, Rose in a nook of blankets after getting her appendice removed (because even in parallel dimensions people had appendices that sometimes got infected, or in this one at least. Mundane life trumped all magic at the end of the day).

Of course, he would look at Rose in her pajamas making scrambled eggs and think that she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. But the people in the benches looked at these snapshots of Every Day Rose, Mundane Rose, Boring Rose, Sunday Morning Rose and all the other kinds of Supposedly Unextraordinary Rose and they balled their eyes out.

So that, added to the fact that he'd stayed up impossibly late at night trying to tap into the Doctor's previously drawn conclusions on death to avoid having to think them up himself, got him thinking that maybe people had to die. Not to maintain a balance in the universe or because wear and tear eventually reduced organs to lumps of cells, but maybe because it served as a wake-up call. Maybe because it was a way to showcase how beautiful people were. Maybe the universe or God or whoever it was would kill a human every now and then to remind all the other ones that they were creatures of extraordinary beauty, of extreme value and of unbelievable fragility.

That made sense to him. A bit. He thought about Donna who called herself unextraordinary, for example. Yeah, it had to be good- to shake those people up every now and then and alert them of how precious they were. Okay. That was a decently logical cause-to-effect phenomenon.

But he had been there all along to let Rose know that she was beautiful. He'd done so religiously, regularly, with pleasure, daily, gladly, loudly, unashamedly. So why had death had to interfere too?

Maybe despite his title, all he'd ever know about death for sure was that it had gotten to Rose Tyler.