inspired by the song lyric from "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons that I appropriated for the title. it took on a life of its own from there.
I don't really know how to describe what this turned out to be. It's a mixture of a childhood best friends au and a high school sweetheart au along with a war au and a reunion. It spans 19 years of their lives and all I can really say is that it's a love story.
It's always a love story.
He's nine when he moves in across the street from her. Rose immediately decides that John is going to be her new best friend, regardless of his feelings on the matter, and spends the entire summer by his side. She shows him her favorite hiding places and teaches him her favorite games. He teases her and pulls her hair but also puts plasters on her knees when she falls off of her bicycle.
She giggles through the tears she's trying to hide and calls him "Doctor" before pressing a kiss to his cheek and running off.
The nickname sticks and so does Rose. By the end of the summer, John was as enthusiastic about being Rose Tyler's best friend as she was.
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They're fourteen and the phrase "John and Rose" rolls off the tongue of everyone in town as if their individual names have become one. It's not surprising considering how often they're together, still best friends after all these years, and how often they've managed to cause trouble already. It's never anything serious but whenever something happens, it's assumed John and Rose had something to do with it.
They're fire and gasoline, as one of their teachers puts it—exceedingly useful and fairly benign when separate, but volatile and explosive when combined.
And they were always combined, as inseparable as they had been that first summer together. The explosions they caused never harmed anyone so everyone just watches in amusement as they ran through town hand in hand, laughing at some incomprehensible joke.
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The summer they turn sixteen is when things begin to change. Rose shows up to swim in the Smith's pool and John is rendered speechless at the sight of his best friend in a red bikini. It wasn't that he hadn't been aware that she was attractive before but something just clicks in that moment for him and he spends the summer in a state of perpetual frustration as he attempts to rein in his hormones while not letting onto Rose how easily she affects him.
They are on the roof of the school, staring at the stars and drinking a bottle of whiskey that John had nicked from his uncle's liquor cabinet, when Rose leans over and kisses him. They are both more than a little tipsy but the feel of lips sliding on lips and tongues clumsily dancing with each other was the best thing either of them had ever experienced.
After that night "John and Rose" took on a whole new meaning in the town and people laugh, saying it had really only been a matter of time.
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John has just turned eighteen and he tells Rose he's enlisting in the army. There wasn't a war but he needs to get out of this small town, needs to see more of the world and this is his only shot. Rose has heard him talk about getting out since they were eleven so she wasn't surprised.
It still feels like he's leaving her behind as much as the town, though.
She tries to hold together the pieces of her heart and support him the best that she could. If she kisses him a little more desperately and their nights together feel more like a goodbye than ever before then she really can't be blamed.
Rose wants out too, wants to see the world, but she wants to see it with John and not in a military uniform.
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Rose cries when she sees him in his uniform the day he leaves town to go to training. His hair had been cropped close to his head, making his ears stand out and he looked so much older than he ever had, blue eyes flashing conflicting emotions at her—excitement, fear, regret, love. He kisses her one last time, pouring all of those emotions into it and hoping she understands the words he hasn't managed to say to her.
(She does. She also makes sure that he hears her say them before he boards a bus and leaves her behind with a sad smile and a promise that he'll write as often as he can.)
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Rose spends her eighteenth birthday alone, not wanting to face anyone in town now that she was just the leftover half of a pair that had been a fixture, not wanting to face the looks of pity when she went to the post office and returned empty-handed.
She doesn't get a letter until two days after her birthday; two and a half months after John had left.
After that, it was a bit more often—a letter a month or so, telling her that he was fine, that he missed her, that he was expecting to get his orders soon, that there might be a war brewing and he would have to fight instead of just seeing the world.
Rose writes him every week and tries not to let on that she is worried about him, about the looming war and the part he would have to play in it.
She ends every letter with a reminder that she loved him.
He still doesn't say the words.
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John's twenty and in the middle of a war that he doesn't believe in but has to fight. His hands are stained with blood, his soul even more so, and he knows he's never going to feel clean again. He wants to run, wants to escape the fighting and see the world like he planned but he couldn't, not when some other person would just be sent to suffer in his place.
He stops writing to Rose, not having anything he can say about the atrocities he sees, the atrocities he commits. He doesn't want her to know about the darkness that is growing inside of him, doesn't want to stain her by association.
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Rose is twenty-one and an administrative assistant in one of the biggest hospitals in the capitol city. She sees men and women come in and out of the hospital in states of injury she never even knew was possible.
She always keeps an eye out for a pair of piercing blue eyes and ears that are slightly too big, hoping that he never comes in this place of disease and death but wishing she knew where he was.
The stack of letters returned undeliverable on her desk haunts her but she still continues to write.
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He's twenty-three and the war's over and he has been discharged, sent home to live a normal life with a few medals pinned to his chest.
John doesn't go home. Has no idea where home is anymore, no idea where Rose is or if she'd even want to see him after four years of radio silence by him. He's not sure he deserves to see her anyways.
He doesn't even know what normal is anymore and the medals are no compensation for the things he's seen and done. He stuffs them in the back of a drawer and tries to drink away the memories while sitting in his tiny new flat in the city. His scars aren't as visible as some of the other soldiers' but they're still there.
He takes another pull from his bottle of whiskey and carefully opens a well-worn letter. He memorized it long ago but he still traces the words of love at the bottom, traces her name and the name she bestowed upon him at the age of nine, with a reverent finger. It's the same thing he did on his worst nights with the picture of the smiling girl he'd left behind, the picture he's kept in the pocket over his heart since the day he'd left town.
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He's twenty-five and he joins the police force, figuring he has the skills necessary. There's another war brewing already but he's not going back. Just the thought of it makes him want to pick up a bottle of liquor and drain it even though he hasn't had a drop in six months.
He thinks about going back to the town he grew up in to try and find Rose but he can't bring himself to face all the people he'd left behind years ago and the questions they would have or all the memories that would haunt every street corner.
None of the people he works with dare to ask him about the faded and creased picture of a smiling blonde that he keeps in his uniform pocket.
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Rose is twenty-five and she stopped writing letters to John two years ago when the war ended. She still unconsciously searches crowds for him, but the truth is she has no idea if he even came home from the war. His aunt and uncle haven't heard from him, no one has heard from him, and the only comfort she has is that they never received a notice from the army informing them of his death.
She no longer works at the hospital, instead devoting her time to a non-profit that supports soldiers that have returned home and have no support system in place to help them transition.
She also joins in on the protests happening all over the city. She's seen the subpar treatments firsthand at the hospital and will do anything she can to effect change. She hates the wars, hates the way the government treats the men and women who chose to fight for their country. She'll support the soldiers themselves until her dying breath but she will also shout her objections to the wars and the treatment of those soldiers until someone listens to her.
Wars took her dad from her when she was just a baby and then they took John and she can find no way to justify either of those losses when those wars were so pointless, when those losses could have been easily prevented.
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They're both still twenty-five the first time they see each other again. They're on opposite sides of a protest and they don't speak but their eyes lock for a second, blue meeting brown through the police riot shields and masses of people before she's swept away again.
It takes his breath away, seeing her again, face matured and eyes alight with passion as she shouted with everyone else. She wasn't the girl in the picture in his pocket anymore. Seven years of life and experiences has changed her as much as they've changed him and he wants to know who she is now.
John also wants to run because Rose had always seen straight to his soul and he was terrified that she would take one look at him and walk away in disgust and he doesn't think he could handle that.
Rose's heart stops when their eyes meet. She's spent so long searching crowds for him that she'd given up on finding him and then suddenly he was there. They were in the same city and she'd had no idea. He looks different but he was still the boy, still the man who had defined her life since she was nine years old, even when he wasn't around. She had never pined for him, never let herself become a victim, but even when she'd dated other people and found happiness on her own, John was still in the back of her mind. She has always missed her best friend more than anything and wishes she could share the ups and downs of her life with him.
When she gets back to her flat after the protest she chooses not to seek him out even though she knows it would be easy to find him now that she knows he's a police officer. She figures John has his reasons for not finding her before now, for not writing her, and she has a feeling that she's not going to agree with those reasons if she ever hears them but they're something he's going to have to work through on his own.
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It's just after his twenty-sixth birthday when John quits the police force.
The protests had been growing more heated as months passed and the police's violent actions against the mostly peaceful protesters sit wrong with him. He never sees Rose among the masses again but he always looks and hopes that she is not the target of any of the police violence that is growing more frequent. When he realizes that he would much rather be part of the protests instead of trying to stop them, he hands in his badge and walks out of the station with the only personal effect he ever brought in—the picture of Rose that he's kept with him for eight years.
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It's another month and a half before John finally starts looking for Rose.
He goes to protests and shares his story of being a soldier in a fruitless war he didn't believe in, talks about all the things the war took from him. He never catches another glimpse of Rose and can't seem to find her anywhere. He keeps looking though.
He goes to unofficial group therapy sessions with other ex-soldiers and they try to work through all of the scars the war left them with. One day he pulls the picture of Rose out of his pocket and shows it to the group and tells them about how he grew up with her, how he fell in love with her and then left her to join the army because he was scared of how much he loved her and he wanted to see the world. Everyone stays silent as he tells them about all the letters she sent even when he wasn't answering them and how he thinks she deserves so much better than him but he's been trying to find her so he can at least tell her thank you and maybe finally say the words she deserved to hear years ago if she'll let him say them. If not, at least maybe he'll get his best friend back.
It's quiet for a few moments as everyone processes his story, as they think about the people they've left behind as well. Then one man speaks up, asks what the girl's name was because the picture looked vaguely familiar. When John tells him Rose's name, the man lets out a hoarse laugh and says that against all the odds, he knows a Rose Tyler. She worked at the non-profit that had helped him with funding the physical therapy he'd needed after the war.
John doesn't bolt out of the meeting to go the office where she apparently works, but it's a near thing.
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They're both twenty-six when John walks into Rose's office and they both freeze, drinking in the sight of the other fully for the first time in eight years. Their conversation is a little stilted at first, neither of them knowing where to begin or what to say but Rose's stomach rumbles, breaking the ice fully and they both start laughing.
They go to get chips and she jokes that it's like their first official date all over again when John realizes he doesn't have his wallet since he hadn't planned on going anywhere except group therapy today.
Slowly they open up about the lives they've each led in their years apart. Not every scar is revealed and not every secret is told, but it's a start and when John reaches across the table to lace his fingers with hers, they both think that it's exactly what they need. They're not the same people they were at eighteen when he left but they're still somehow John and Rose and maybe they still belong together. After all, she still feels like home to him and he's still her Doctor underneath all of the scars and open wounds that litter his heart.
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He's twenty-eight and she's a few months shy of it when he nervously pulls a ring box out of the pocket of the leather jacket she'd given him the year before. It's ten years to the day John left her to join the army and he mumbles something about wanting to have good memories for this date before flipping the box open and asking Rose to spend forever with him.
She answers him with a yes and a kiss that's nothing like their clumsy first one on the school rooftop but feels like it nonetheless—the breathless start of a new adventure, one that they would be able to take on together, one full of love and hope and promise.