Leaving Rose Tyler
By TeggieLady
One
Jackie Tyler has a new friend every few months.
Rose doesn't always like them, sometimes they smoke too much and smell funny or say things Rose doesn't understand (which she then says at school, gets into a lot of trouble and has to promise her mum she not say them again).
But mostly Rose doesn't like these friends of her mother's, because they make her mum cry. Always…
And Rose hates it when her mum cries.
Usually she doesn't cry in front of Rose, but Rose can hear her, nonetheless. The walls aren't that thick. What Rose can't hear though, is what happens when one of her mum's friend stays the night for a sleepover.
For some reason her mum never lets her stay up and never talks too loud, so Rose can't hear what happens in her mother's room.
Uncle Mark isn't Rose's Uncle.
Rose can't remember when she had started to call him that, but now it seems she always has. Uncle Mark is a very good friend of Rose's mum. And he goes to a lot of sleepovers.
He wasn't the first friend of her mothers but Rose likes to think he will be the last. He makes her mum happy, and that makes Rose happy. He buys her sweets (to Rose that is, he always gets her mum flowers), they go on picnics together and Uncle Mark has even read Rose a bed time story or two.
Rose likes Uncle Mark, she likes him a lot.
Until he died.
Something about a mugging that went wrong. Uncle Mark refused, the mugger was egged on by his mates, there was a fight and he died.
His wallet was found with his body, untouched; it seemed doubtful that the mugger that killed Uncle Mark had intended to kill him. Least of all, for six pounds eighty four and a video membership card. He had only nipped out to the shops for a packet of fags anyway.
Rose was seven years old.
She doesn't find out he was dead until she is fifteen.
Jackie didn't tell Rose he was dead, only that he went away, but she didn't explain why.
Rose had wondered if it had been her fault.
Uncle Mark is the first person to leave Rose Tyler.
Two
The second person is Jimmy Stones.
He says the things every girl wants to hear, and does all the right things (to Rose at least) that makes her heart melt and turn into a warm puddle of sweetness that gravitates all around her body.
Jimmy is in a band, older, has a superiority complex, is known to the police on several separate occasions and Rose's mum can't stand him.
This rebel without a cause is every teenage girl's dream.
Her secret hope that if he fought for her in this cruel world where no one understands them, if she loves him enough, one day he would change.
He doesn't.
Rose gave him everything and it wasn't enough. He was her life, and no matter how much she had tried to keep a hold of the illusion, she would never be his.
Not his life, but he had already made her his.
He soon grew bored, when the battle was won. When Rose moved out and quit school to stay with him. That was winning; his prize for his victory was her life.
And then he leaves her.
Someone blonde and pretty who used to do modelling work or was it acting? But Rose wouldn't have seen any of her films.
Her mum had always said blokes liked blondes.
She gave her life to be with him.
And he leaves her without a second thought.
Because he didn't want to be in hers.
Three
The third person to leave Rose Tyler could also be the first.
Her Dad.
Her mum had told Rose stories; from as far back as she could remember.
This brave shinning knight.
The man that would be so proud of her, that always did the right thing and held a beautiful flawless romantic relationship with her mum.
Until she meets him.
Pete Tyler isn't a fantasy, he's real.
He isn't flawless.
But he loves her.
And he does the right thing.
He saves the world.
And in doing so, he leaves her.
She hopes that no one would have to give their lives to save the world, ever again.
Four
Captain Jack Harkness died.
He fights bravely but perishes under the hands…guns, of three Daleks while trying to buy the Doctor just enough time to build something that would kill both himself, the Time Lord and the entire planet beneath them. The planet with a slow dim-witted society, whose inhabitants liked to kill each other in long, drawn-out, pointless wars when they thought things were getting a bit boring and needed spicing up. This planet was also known as Earth.
Before Jack dies he kisses her, he tells her she is worth fighting for.
But is she worth dieing for?
It didn't matter, the question, he dies anyway.
He knew he was going to die and he still walked away to the other part of the station.
It was his choice and he chose to leave her.
To die, to save the world.
The universe.
Fifth
He explodes.
In a flash of gold light, he's gone.
And in his place is a stranger.
He was The Doctor.
Her Doctor.
And then he was gone. In his place a man too happy, too pretty, too soft where the Doctor had been hard; too cheerful where the Doctor had been broody.
This impostor thinks he's her Doctor.
He's wrong.
Her Doctor is dead.
He died, and all Rose wants to know is why?
And what gives this fraud the right to call himself her Doctor?
Six
When Rose was young, she dreamed of a man on a white horse would come and save her.
He would take her away from her dreary life and they would live in his castle.
He would hold her and tell her he loved her, they would dance at fancy balls with her in a big expensive dress.
She would be his Queen, he would be her King.
A happy ever after.
It didn't work out like that.
The Doctor didn't have a horse or a castle when they met. But he did have a TARDIS and that's like a horse and a castle rolled into one, only better.
Rose was happy with this life, she didn't get everything she wanted but…the Doctor did dance with her once, and you can't run in a dress. They can't have a happy ever after because life doesn't work like that, there is always an after. And at some point, it isn't going to be happy. Besides, he's not human so he doesn't want a stupid ape Queen.
And then things change, he changes.
He goes to save someone else, but this time he wants to live in a real castle with them. They dance at a ball, with the damsel in distress dressed in an expensive dress.
He saves her from the things that go bump in the night, far more spectacularly then he has ever done for Rose.
After all this time, he had the horse. A white horse.
As the Doctor dances with the Uncrowned Queen, Rose smiles sadly.
He's not her King, not her Doctor.
Her Doctor would have never left her behind.
Rose just adds him to the long list of people to leave her.
Seven
Mickey has been there for her through thick and thin.
Until he found something better.
And he was right, she doesn't need him. But she did, she needed him for so long and then she didn't. She starts to wonder…
Who's leaving who?
Eight
The Doctor says he's living the same old life on the TARDIS without her.
Is she really just that replaceable?
The memories of her, are they put in a box? And only pulled out when some companion further down the line asks "has anyone been stupid enough to love you knowing you will never love them back?"
As he leaves the beach, Rose wonders if he has left that memory box behind with her? Never to be opened again.
Nine
Rose Tyler lives her life.
Her wonderful, fantastic life.
And each death she sees is a nail in her coffin.
Her family is soon gone, her life becoming more obscure with each name she can't remember, people's names that she has heard only thirty seconds before. Some days she has to be reminded of her own.
Her Dad died first, car accident. The irony was not lost on the two remaining Tyler women, the youngest female Tyler having died of cot death at just six weeks old.
Then, her mum. Slow and painful, cancer, which she fought and won… fought and won, fought and then seemed to be winning, but then didn't want to win anymore. The day Jackie Tyler dies is the first time in years she's been happy.
Mickey Smith… well no one knows what happened to him. Did he mess with the wrong aliens, or was it gangsters? Were they the same, were they alien gangsters? This is where the ending is unsure.
They never find his body, or the person who did it, but it was sometime after his wife and child were killed in that house fire.
The ninth person to leave Rose behind is her family.
A unit, all of them, with no one left.
Ten
Rose Tyler dies, aged eighty four, leaving the world behind.
She doesn't stop to mourn her own passing or the world she would never see again.
It never stayed with her anyway.