When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

-Leonardo da Vinci

-0-0-0-

"Let me back!"

"I want you safe. My Doctor."

"They keep trying to split us up, but they never ever will."

"Stuck with you, that's not so bad."

"I made my choice a long time ago, and I am never going to leave you."

"Let me back!"

-0-0-0-

Rose Tyler wakes with tears in her eyes.

That's how it normally is for her these days. Normal. That damn word makes her want to laugh and cry and scoff all at the same time (which, as she recently discovered, is impossible). Her first thought as she watches herself trying to go about an ordinary, everyday life, is that it's nothing close to normal, not for her, not anymore. But it is, isn't it? This is what everyone does. This is how everyone lives, wallowing through life in slow-motion, stuck in the bog, taking the long way around. It's completely normal. But it's not. Not for her, not after two years of cheating time and taking shortcuts. After all that time spent bouncing from place to place, time to time, how is she supposed to go back to this?

Simple answer: she's not.

But she has to.

It's not fair. None of it.

She finds that she can define her reality in 'if only' statements these days. If only the TARDIS hadn't been sucked into that alternate reality months ago. If only Torchwood hadn't felt the need to screw everything up by working with those 'ghosts', those Cybermen. If only that damn lever had stayed in place. If only Pete Tyler hadn't jumped back to her reality in the nick of time to grab her and pull her into his… Yes, that one makes the list every time. She can't help but hate him a little bit for stranding her here, trapped under the weight of all this crushing normality. She'd almost prefer eternal oblivion in the void between dimensions to this pathetic attempt at a life. And it's not just the normality of it. It isn't. Maybe, given time, she could adjust back to this sort of a life, trudging through moments one after the next in order instead of hopping between them as she pleased.

But she doesn't think she could ever adjust to a life without him.

That's how she thinks of him these days. Simply that. Him. Because it hurts to even think his name, hurts to summon up an image of him in her mind – especially because the first image that comes to mind is the last time she saw him. The last time she'll ever see him (it hurts to think that, too). Reaching out to her, screaming her name, misery and agony and awful desperation on his face. And it hurts to see him that way. Screw her, she can be as miserable as she likes. But she doesn't want to see him burdened by those feelings, too. He already has so much weight to carry, and she hates the very idea of adding to it.

So seeing his face in that moment is pure, sheer anguish. Because it's the face of someone watching someone they care about die.

She might as well be dead, anyways. This, this agonizingly slow, unbelievably dull, unbearably empty affair, isn't a life.

So she thinks of him as him. She doesn't think his name because it hurts. But she can't help it when she's dreaming, and it hurts just as much there.

"I want you safe. My Doctor."

The strange thing is, she doesn't remember ever saying that. She has an image of the event in her mind, but she can't tie it to a memory. It's strange, too – she almost wants to think she made it up, because it makes no sense. In the visuals that go along with those words she doesn't remember uttering, she's glowing. Like some kind of an angel (though few things could be further from the truth, especially now). This golden glow, this blinding light, it's everywhere. It burns like fire in her eyes, floods from the open doors of the TARDIS behind her. And when she speaks, her voice is haunting and ethereal, echoing like there are five Roses all speaking at once. Her surroundings are mostly dull and gray… she recognizes the place… Satellite Five, it's Satellite Five. She's on Satellite Five. And there are… there are Daleks, Daleks everywhere… And there he is, it's him, right there in front of her, and he hasn't regenerated, he's still the insane, Northern, leather-jacket-wearing, big-eared, big-nosed, eccentric, wonderful man she fell in love with in the start, the man who looked her in the eyes and told her to run…

"I want you safe," she tells him in her ethereal voice. "My Doctor. Protected from the false god."

Always the same words. Always those same words. And they don't make sense at all.

It's been three nights since she became trapped in this universe. She doesn't count time in days anymore – she counts in nights. Because in the day, she hides from reality, from her family, from the pain. She wishes it all away. She wishes herself somewhere else, somewhere far away with him. In the day, she isolates herself. But come night… that's when her mind forces her to embrace everything she tries to deny in the day. In her dreams, she relives time with him. Only in her dreams is she able to fully realize how much she misses him, because only in her dreams does she open herself up enough to feel the agony of his absence.

Three nights. And every night, the same dream. It's a montage of sorts, a collaboration of memories of her and him. The assortment varies every time. She hugs him a lot in the dream. The time she kissed him while possessed by Cassandra is a common occurrence, too, though admittedly, she doesn't mind that one as much. But the only memory that is there every time is that one. Those words.

"I want you safe. My Doctor."

Sometimes she gets more. The first night, she also heard his voice – his original voice, before he regenerated – calling out to her, crying, "Rose, you've got to stop this, you've got to stop this now!" Last night, she also saw the sign reading BAD WOLF CORPORATION, saw herself raise her hand, saw the letters float off the sign and fly away, fluttering into nothingness. But tonight, she got only those eleven words.

"I want you safe. My Doctor. Protected from the false god."

The 'protected from the false god' part is new. Every night, she gets the basic six, plus whatever detail her subconscious sees fit to add in. Tonight, she got five extra words. But they don't make any sense, either. None of it makes sense.

God, she misses him. She misses him so much it's like a physical pain, an aching in her chest that just won't go away. Yesterday, she actually took an ibuprofen pill to see if it would help. It didn't. The only thing that can possibly help is him, here, now. His arms around her, the warmth of his body seeping into hers, two heartbeats pressed against her chest. His mouth at her ear, whispering love and reassurances or maybe just her name. She doesn't care what he's saying, just so long as it's his voice.

"Rose?" There's a light, hesitant knocking at her door, and she's relieved to hear that the voice of the person on the other side isn't Pete, who she still resents for bringing her here, or Mickey, who she can't deal with right now because of the muddled mix of feelings that seeing him brings to the front of her mind. No, it's Jackie. It's her mother. It's the one person here who perhaps she could actually stand to see.

"Come in," she calls weakly, and she's almost surprised to hear that her voice still works. The door creaks slightly as it opens, revealing her mother silhouetted against the brightness of the hallway outside.

Rose flinches, recoiling and squinting as the light floods into her room. For the past few days, she's deliberately kept the lights of in her room. She finds a tiny bit of solace in the darkness. In the darkness, she can pretend that she's home in her reality. Better yet, she can pretend that she'll look to her left and he'll be there, standing in the shadows in the corner, smiling at her.

"Sorry," Jackie says quickly, pushing the door closed behind her. Well, not closed exactly. She leaves it open, just a crack, just to let in enough light so that she won't trip over one of the many things littering the floor that, at one point over the past few days, Rose threw across the room in a fit of angst and rage. "Still in bed," she notes as she approaches her. "Have you looked at the time?"

Rose doesn't reply.

"It's nearly one," Jackie informs her. "I brought you some lunch, if you're hungry."

Rose doesn't reply. So Jackie just walks the rest of the way to where she's sitting up in bed, blankets tangled around her legs, and places a tray on her lap. There's a small white plate with a nicely cut sandwich on it, along with a small bowl of chips and a clear glass of water. Rose immediately takes the water and moves it to her bedside table – it doesn't really matter, but she supposes she'd rather not spill it.

"Sweetheart, are you okay?" Jackie asks after a second, but instead of the are-you-seriously-asking-me-that glare she'd been expecting, she is facing a daughter just as unresponsive as ever. Rose simply sits there listlessly, staring across the room with a blank expression and dead eyes. She does not give her mother any sign that she has heard what she was saying. And Jackie finds herself longing for the passionate, angry Rose she got just after Pete pulled her into this reality. The Rose that refused food, refused company, refused comfort. The Rose who screamed her pain for all the world to hear. Jackie remembers a conversation they'd had on the first day after they became trapped here, when she came in to try to give her supper while she was having one of her fits.

"Rose!" she exclaimed indignantly, ducking as an alarm clock went flying over her head and crashed against the wall behind her. "Calm down!"

"Don't tell me to calm down," Rose replied, her tone deadly, her eyes burning with anger as she pointed accusatorily at her mother. "Don't you ever tell me to calm down."

"I'm sorry," Jackie said weakly. "I'm sorry – but honestly, sweetheart, would he want this?" She spread her arms to indicate the entirety of the already-trashed room. "Wouldn't he want you to move on, make a life for yourself?"

"Stop talking about him like he'd dead!" Rose snapped viciously, yanking a book from the shelf and hurling it at the wall; it missed Jackie by inches. "He's not dead! He's out there, and I'm going to get back to him!"

"What do you mean, get back to him?"

"I mean get back to him," she growled. "I need to find a way to – to reactivate those Torchwood reality-jumping devices, to reopen the rift, something, I don't know, something –"

"He said you couldn't!" Jackie cried. "He said that if you did, you'd – I don't know – tear the universe apart or something –"

"Then I'll tear the universe apart," Rose said, and the deadly calm in her daughter's voice as she made that statement froze Jackie where she stood. "I'll tear the universe apart until I find him," she continued. "Nothing can stop me from getting back to him."

That Rose, it seems, is gone now, replaced by this dull, soulless husk of a person, this empty shell that used to be so full of life. She's given up. And that is not something that Rose Tyler does often.

"I'll just go, then," Jackie says softly, moving back towards the door. "Try to eat something. I love you." And then she leaves the room and closes the door behind her, and Rose returns to the blessed darkness and to her painful thoughts.

It's only once the sound of her mother's footsteps retreating down the hall have faded completely from her ears that Rose allows herself to move. And that's not all she allows herself to do. For the first time since it happened, the first time in three nights, she allows herself to feel the pain she's been trying to hold at bay. She invites it in. And she does so by parting her lips and finding her voice and allowing a sound she's been trying to suppress escape for the first time in three nights. She allows herself to say his name.

It's barely more than a breath, barely even a whisper, but it's enough to send pangs of agony ricocheting through her chest, enough to constrict her throat, enough to summon moisture to the corners of her eyes. It's barely a sound, but it's enough.

"Doctor."