Disclaimer: I'm only borrowing the characters. They don't belong to me but if the Doctor feels like popping round with the TARDIS he's more than welcome. Except that would probably involve me dying, so maybe not.

Author's Note: I'm still not sure about the ending. Please review with feedback, even if it's flames because this isn't perfect yet.

There will come a day when the sky will fall, the stars will burn out and everything will turn to dust; he has always known that but it's never ceased to cast a shadow over him.

Not so much that one day he will die but that the universe, his universe will be gone and so will he; not even an obscure name fading from an old book or a tombstone or even a voice on the wind. There will be no books, no tombstones and no wind. No light or life or even time. Just a cold, dark forever in a void where time means nothing.

Will the dust speak of civilizations gone forever and the rocks sing to each other across the vast, silent nothingness, he wonders?

It seems bizarre, incomprehensible that when the suns go out and death falls like day turning to night that there will be no screams and no mourning. Just silence. He has seen it happen before to his own planet; a whole people going with it. Except him. The Sole Survivor.

Even then, among the ashes and the dust and the emptiness, even knowing that everyone else had gone he couldn't understand why there were no screams and no mourning.

So he added his own to the sudden chasm in the universe, his universe and when it was time to get up and move on, life went on, dragging him with it. But he took the screams and the mourning and the pain into the chasm left inside him, because anything was better than the terrible emptiness.

A time will come when the universe will either stretch out too far and everything will freeze and die, a victim of its own ambition; or reach its limit and suddenly implode back in on itself, perhaps causing another Big Bang, a new, fresh universe. And he'll be part of it, every atom in his body torn apart and reborn as something else, something new. He can't help liking that thought. Just like another regeneration really.

And the first option? He'll take the chance. There's no harm, he tells himself, in believing in something. A leap of faith. Leaping out of the chasm and into the light.

One day the universe itself will die. And then, he tells himself, it will be reborn. Perhaps it's happened already and the universe is like one colossal phoenix; dying in a fiery apocalypse and rising again and again from the ashes.

One day he will find out. But until then there are better things to fill yourself with than screams and mourning and fire and death. There is love and life and laughter. And there's Rose.

Rose. One day she will leave her own chasm in his hearts. Like the universe she too will die. So will he, and perhaps after surviving so much and so many this will be a blessing. Either way she is worth the loss. Maybe one day she'll bring light into the chasm. Maybe the days he forgets it, the days that are only him and Rose and the TARDIS and the universe will become more common until the wound Gallifrey left becomes a scar, always with him but never painful. It might even become a fond memory one day.

Time kills and destroys without prejudice or compassion and one day it will take Rose from him. But it also heals; fixes the damage it leaves. One day Rose will die and even if it feels like a betrayal to admit it, even to himself, he will survive it. Because he has survived so many losses.

But today is not that day. Today belongs to both of them.

THE END