TITLE: my days in the sun
AUTHOR: Pilla Jeffrey
CATEGORY: Angst, Drama
CHARACTER/PAIRING: Ten, Rose, brief appearances by Jackie, Nine, Martha, Donna, Jack, Mickey, Eleven, Amy, and Pete.
SPOILERS: Only major ones through "Waters of Mars"
RATING: PG
CONTENT WARNINGS: super!angst
SUMMARY: There are nineteen years of Rose Tyler on planet Earth. Nineteen years for the Doctor to ration at a distance, never speaking to her, only watching as she laughs and cries her way through life.
STATUS: Complete
DISCLAIMER: I do not own Doctor Who.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I just finished a complete rewatch of Doctor Who and I got a little sentimental. I warn you, it's a touch sappy. You may have been able to tell that from my quoting of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Touch me
It's so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days in the sun
If you touch me
You'll understand what happiness is

Look
A new day has begun

There are nineteen years of Rose Tyler on planet Earth. Nineteen years for the Doctor to ration at a distance, never speaking to her, only watching as she laughs and cries her way through life. He begins by keeping a mental tally of when he's visited, but soon he's gone back so many times that he needs to keep a written record so he doesn't overlap himself.

He hides his notebook all over the TARDIS: sometimes underneath the grates in the Console Room, sometimes in the Library, sometimes by the pool behind the kick-boards. He doesn't trust it in any one spot; namely, he doesn't want anyone to find it, but more so he fears himself latching onto it more than he already does.

On his first trip back, he ends up spending an evening with Jackie Tyler.

He buys a ticket to the Jericho Street Junior School Gymnastics Competition. He takes his seat in the gymnasium and looks at the sad little set-up of bars and beams and mats. There on the practice beam, seven years old in a pink leotard and high pigtails, is Rose Tyler. She is positively glowing.

"You got a kid here?"

The Doctor turns and sees Jackie sitting next to him, clad head-to-toe in denim. "No," he says before realizing how improper that sounds and corrects himself, "I'm a teacher here. Good to support the students."

Jackie, not one to be suspicious of anything, nods. "That's nice of you. What year do you teach?"

"Oh, uh, Year 6."

"Well, you best keep an eye out for my daughter, then. She's just begun—Year 3, see—but she's just brilliant. No mind for maths, but sharp as a tack." Jackie points, proud. "That's her, right there, pigtails. Most girls have ponytails, but no, not my Rose. She's got mad ideas, just like her dad. I love that. She's special." She says it like every mother does, but the Doctor knows that for once, this mother isn't saying out of ego, but rather because it is a simple truth of the universe.

"I've got a good feeling about her," he says. "I bet she does well tonight."

"Yeah?" Jackie says, faux-modest. "I guess we'll see."

The night has highs and lows and as it comes to a close, Rose is fifth with one event left. There's a bar in front of her that seems unfairly tall for the short-statured child Rose, but she's unfazed. That's his Rose, he thinks. Give her a challenge and she approaches it without fear.

Rose jumps up and props herself atop the bar and suddenly she's spinning round and round and it's technically perfect, but what's more important is how she can't stop smiling and he can't stop smiling watching her smiling. Rose is already flying high above the Earth and she's a natural.

When she gets first in the event and the overall bronze, Jackie screams and starts hugging him. "Oh, the bronze!" Jackie gushes. "My little girl, the bronze! I can't believe it."

"I can," The Doctor says. If there's one thing he can believe—"She's fantastic."

Jackie smiles thoughtfully. "Yeah, she is, isn't she?"

Martha asks where he was. "I was going mental without you," she says, trying to entice him into a laugh.

He flicks a switch and the TARDIS whirrs. "Sports tournament. We won the bronze."

He almost runs into himself one Christmas. There he is—jumper and leather jacket and oh, those ears!—hauling a red bicycle down the street, leaving tire tracks in the snow. "Oi, you there mate. Do the Tylers live there?" he asks, pointing up to their usual flat. "Jackie, Rose?"

"Yeah, they do." It's always a bit strange talking to himself. "Christmas present?"

The younger Doctor nods proudly. "Ten speed red bicycle. Every twelve-year-old girl needs a bicycle."

"They do indeed." He watches himself go off, about to sonic screwdriver himself into the flat and miraculously not wake a soul. He'd gotten her the bike after the mess with her father: he felt so stupid for giving into her, but more so he felt so much for a girl who had also lost her family. So he got her a bicycle and snuck it beneath her tree, not a creature heard stirring.

It seems so long ago, but here he is still, always returning to Rose.

Donna never asks about his absences. Rather, they have an unspoken agreement: he goes off to watch Rose and she gets to go off to watch her dad. Donna doesn't talk about her father much—unlike Rose, she had him around for most of her adult life—but she still misses him. She can't prevent his death (and the Doctor, having learned his lesson with fathers, wouldn't tempt her by bringing her anywhere near the time of her father's stroke) so the Doctor trusts her to be as discrete as he is.

Jack Harkness lied about only seeing Rose once or twice. The Doctor sees him over a dozen times across the 1990s and early into the next millennium, standing tall, wearing a broad, white-toothed smile while Rose twirls wildly through the zoo or a tear-filled reverie when she scrapes her knee on her way to school, already late.

He also lied about never talking to her.

It's Shareen Costello's sweet sixteen party. The Doctor finds his way in with psychic paper, but Jack being Jack only needs to offer a "And who are you?" to get first-hand access to the festivities.

The whole affair is about to descend into a mess of teenage hormones, but until that point, parents and grandparents need to be appeased. The DJ announces a Father-Daughter dance. Shareen takes the floor with her dad and everyone else follows suit except for Rose. She sits awkwardly at her table, picking at her cake, mixing her frosting all orange. Jackie is misty-eyed. Mickey doesn't know what to say. The Doctor almost has to chain himself to the punch bowl to stop himself from going over. And so Jack steps in.

"Would you like to dance?" he asks, extending a hand and a trademark Jack Harkness smile.

Rose looks up at him—my, he's handsome—and then looks down. "It's a Father-Daughter Dance."

"So what?" Jack's still smiling.

Rose can't help but smile back. "Yeah. So what?" She has a tendency of taking risks and trusting strange men, but he's not either. She may not know him, not yet, but he's undoubtedly a friend.

Jack escorts Rose onto the dance floor. He's a complete gentleman, spinning her and joking with her. Rose is having the time of her life.

The Doctor has a sudden craving to dance with a blonde in a Union Jack.

The real Rose, his Rose, is just as he remembers her, only stronger. He loves that in her, that her spirit never falters and that she grows exponentially from challenge. Her hand still fits perfectly in his and he can feel where her smile presses into his shoulder. And when she picks the Other Him—the one he told her to pick, the one she should pick, the one he never actually thought she would pick—the pain is just as real as it was the day his hearts broke the first time.

After Donna's departure, his visits to Rose become more frequent. He tries to stop himself, reminding himself that visiting her is one less time he can ever see her, but he can't. He's drawn to her. His notepad is full to the brim of sketches and markings and dates and times and he can barely keep track of how many times he's gone back, only that he has fewer and fewer trips left.

On the night after Adelaide kills herself, he finds himself spinning into 2004.

Rose is a teenager and Jimmy Stone has just broken her heart. Jimmy is vile and horrible and worst of all he convinced her that he loved her.

She comes home, back to the Powell Estate, but she can't bear to go back up to her mum's flat and tell Jackie how right she was. So instead she just stands there, crying. She feels foolish. Here she thought she could change everything, but she only made things worse. She can't wipe the tears away fast enough.

For a second, he wants to be the Time Lord Victorious and swoop in and take her across the universe, fixed points be damned. But then the gunshot echoes through his head and in that one moment of horrible, shattering hesitation, he misses his chance. Mickey Smith has already swooped in, embracing the tearful Rose, promising to never leave her. Time, once more, asserts itself.

The Doctor swallows hard before walking away.

His body is ransacked with radiation and his next regeneration is mere moments away. So he goes and collects his reward. It's the first time he doesn't feel guilty about visiting Rose. So not guilty, in fact, that it's the only time that he dares to talk to her.

He wants to say so much more. But to her, he's just some miserable drunk and nothing more. Any words he could say to her would be taken as nothing—no, worse, they would be taken as wrong. So instead he tells her that she's going to have a really great year and she smiles at him and he supposes that is enough.

He's brand new: a new new new Doctor with a new companion and a new TARDIS and new adventures and everything is so very new that he feels a soaring delight for the first time in a long time. His mind does not dwell on Rose Tyler—rather, it decides it should not dwell on Rose Tyler—and his body follows suit, scampering across the universe but never to her.

It is not until Amy corners him the kitchen one night that Rose Tyler forces herself to be dwelled upon. "What's this?" she says, finding the journal behind the toaster, between jars of jammy dodgers and jelly babies. She flips open the cover and starts reading before the Doctor can register what she's doing and how to make her stop. "March 26, 1994. 7:48:02 pm to 10:04:52 pm. Bronze."

She gives the Doctor a look. "What's this book? It's just full of dates and odd little phrases. 'Captain Jack'. 'Jimmy Stone'. 'New Year's'. Whose is this?"

Amy has no shame asking for what she wants, and usually the Doctor loves this in her, but right now he can't have it. "Put it back, Amy. Must you stick your thumb in every pie?"

"Now, Doctor. Don't get grumpy-faced." She turns the pages lazily, knowing he can't grab the book from her without a fight—a fight he would obviously lose. More dates, more quick sketches, more nonsense phrases. "It's not like I think I'm your only companion. After all, there's River." She says it like she's teasing a ten-year-old boy about a crush.

The Doctor groans. "This has nothing to do with River."

Amy gives a little pout. "Oh, but it's about someone, isn't it? A girl. You try so hard, Doctor, but you're just like any other man." She keeps flipping pages and then suddenly stops.

There is Rose Tyler, immortalized in graphite. Her blonde hair is to her shoulders and her gaze burns Amy right to her core. She's been drawn as a vision, a vixen: a woman with laughter around the mouth and fire behind the eyes.

"Who is she?" Amy asks, not pointedly, but in awe.

The Doctor has taken pride in no repeats. He is a new man with a bowtie and he doesn't need to rely on silly visits to the past. But as Amy turns the book toward him, showing him Rose's face, his entire being shakes. She leaps back into both his hearts, refusing to be forgotten. If a thing can be remembered, it can come back.

"Her name was Rose Tyler," he says.

The name fits on his tongue as neatly as it always has.

From that moment on, he does return to Rose. Not with the same fervor, but unquestionably with the same need. He's given up on the idea that he has regenerated past her—can ever regenerate past her—and he lets himself melt into time with her.

One time, he watches as a ten-year-old Rose eats chips while hanging upside down on the jungle gym, laughing and almost falling off. The blood is rushing to her head and her cheeks are almost as pink as her lips. It is one of those moments that he regrets he can never visit again, but collects with perfect fuzzy edges in his memory.

He collects and collects and collects until there's almost nothing left. Her entire life can be replayed in his mind and he replays often. He's getting sentimental in his old age.

He waits on one final moment—twenty-four minutes and thirty-three seconds—throughout his final regenerations. He lasts on memories of gymnastics and chips and tears for a hundred years and almost as many companions. It's only as his thirteenth set of hearts begins to putter out that he realizes that it's time to go back.

Jackie Tyler has been in labor for twelve hours and she decided around eleven hours ago that she would never get pregnant again. Pete's been useless: half the time he's blabbering ineffective support and half the time he's hocking his wares at the nurses. The doctor has been a calm presence throughout the process, surprisingly never getting rattled by Jackie's noise.

Finally the baby's head crowns and then the shoulders and then "One last push!" and out comes a little blonde ragamuffin.

"What is it? Boy or girl?" asks Pete.

The doctor smiles at them. "You are the parents to a beautiful baby girl. Mr. Tyler, would you like to cut the umbilical cord?"

Pete hems, clearly uncomfortable. Jackie rolls her eyes. "Oh, Doctor, just cut it. He'll probably faint if he sees me down there," Jackie quips. "Hurry up. I want to hold my baby."

The doctor cuts the cord and begins to clean the baby off. "Do you know what you're going to name her?" he asks nonchalantly.

"Lucy," Pete suggests and Jackie scoffs. "It's the Beatles, Jacks, you can't mock the Beatles."

Jackie clearly can. "I am not naming my daughter Lucy. What a stupid name."

"Well then, what would you name her?"

Jackie looks at him, exasperated. "I don't know. I've been pushing a baby out all day. Why are you making me think?"

"What about Rose?"

Jackie and Pete look up at the doctor. He's wrapping their daughter in a pink blanket so delicately that they almost feel like she belongs to him instead of them. Well, he's just a good doctor, Jackie thinks. He cares about his patients.

"Rose." The name clicks. "Yes," Jackie says. "That's her name. Rose Tyler."

She gives Pete a teary smile and he takes her hand, squeezing it tightly. "Rose Tyler. Oh, Jackie, you did it. You brought her into the world. I love you so much, sweetheart." He kisses her forehead.

The Doctor adjusts Rose in his arms. She doesn't cry, not once. She's perfectly poised, staring at him intently with big brown eyes. The whole world is curious to her, but most of all him. It's as if she can already see through him.

He waves his hand in front of her—a little bit of a hello, but mostly a goodbye—and is taken aback when her small hand reaches out and grabs his forefinger. At his shock, she gurgles out a giggle and she smiles at him. Her hand, even now, fits perfectly with his.

He must have been standing there a moment too long, because Jackie lets out a very audible "Ahem!" with her arms outstretched.

There's only one last thing to do. He frees his hand—she tries to grab it back, and he wants to give it to her, but this is far more important—and lightly places his fingers across her face. He never got the chance to tell her. He never told her. So here he is, opening all the doors of his mind, telling her.

Rose grows silent, looking peculiarly at this man who has poured such love into her. Love that spans lifetimes and universes. A love for the ages. She is so young, so new to the world, but she understands. She knows. She smiles. She will always know.

Reluctantly, he places Rose into Jackie's arms. "Congratulations," he says. "She's going to be brilliant."

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