Written for the Writer In A TARDIS challenge on LiveJournal. This was a first-line challenge.

As always...I don't own it.

It was on the planet with the purple sky and the orange grass that it all started to fall apart. He had to admit he'd been fooling himself.

He'd tried so hard to really believe what he'd told the Doctor when he asked to join them. That he just wanted to see what was out there: spaceships and androids and places where the sky and the grass should have clashed horribly when they met on the horizon, but instead somehow created an eerily beautiful landscape.

But he'd lied. He'd hoped traveling together would let Rose see him differently, not as a lump (and that still stung), but as someone she could rely on for more than just tech support. Someone who was brave and clever.

He'd made a little headway on that 51st century spaceship, with the ice gun and helping the Doctor find the right time window. But when the Doctor rode through the time window on that white horse like a charging knight, what did he do? What could he do?

Nothing, that's what. He couldn't be clever for Rose. Not clever enough to get them off that ship. Eventually they'd have starved to death if the Doctor hadn't returned.

Still, he clung to one bit of hope. The Doctor had seemed smitten with that French woman. Perhaps that would be enough to make Rose see things differently, even though he knew just how forgiving a woman she could be.

He'd held fast to that hope till just a moment ago, when he watched the two of them run down the orange hillside to the violet-tinged stream at its foot.

Hand in hand.

As he watched them splash each other in the water, he knew that it didn't really matter how brave he was, or how clever he was, because it still didn't make him the right man for Rose.

The Doctor was. Not just because he was brave and he was clever, but because of what he did for her. He made her better.

Too good for the likes of him.

Rose was laughing in a way she'd never done in London, even before she'd met the Doctor. In a way that said she had no cares at all in the universe.

He could never give her that, never make her laugh quite like that.

"Oi, Mickey! Aren't you coming down?" They had turned to look at him curiously.

Time for the third wheel to roll on in. He took a breath and tried to sound brighter than he felt. "Yeah, I'm coming."