A/N: This is my first Doctor Who fanfiction, and really the first fanfiction I have written since high school! After reading a few amazing stories I decided on one sleepless night to give it a try, writing out what I thought it might have been like for the tenth Doctor during the events of Doomsday when he lost Rose. It's quite brief, maybe I'll add more to it at a later date. Anyway, I was listening to the "Doomsday" soundtrack on repeat while I wrote this, it was my inspiration, so hauntingly beautiful and tragic. I would suggest you listen to it while reading through this. I'd love to read some reviews, I'm feeling very rusty and out of my element! Much love~!

It was like something from a waking nightmare: alive, raw, bright and inescapable - only he was awake, breathless in disbelief. A moment of total and utter helplessness, compounded by a visceral terror that would interrupt the usual rhythm of the quartet beating in his chest, each heart lagging to produce two aching, consecutive pulses; each wounded organ wrenched within him as a feeling of intense horror flooded his every nerve ending, crawling over his skin, suffocating and choking him, so thick and pervasive it rolled over his tongue and down his throat, tasting of time and loss and destiny.

His lungs burned and throat stung. Was he screaming? Yes, of course, he must be.

Rose.

Her name, short and sweet and terrible on his lips for the briefest of moments, reverberating as a loud and crushingly silent wave in time. The gales of reality clawed at his hair, face and jacket, while his cries were sucked so quickly from him that he could not be sure he had heard them at all. Her voice, of course, was lost to him even before her last desperate cries could cross her beautiful lips, soft and full and pink, lips he wanted only to remember as being creased in a warm, tongue-in-teeth smile.

As the torrential force of the void uncurled her fingers one by one from the sweat-slicked grip of the lever she had been so desperately clinging to it seemed for a moment as if time had stood still, mercifully, cruelly, allowing him to lose himself in the hazel depths of her eyes before she was torn away from him, the force of the breach battering her harshly in the violence of collapsing reality. She was reaching for him, small hands clawing at the increasing nothingness that would drag her into oblivion. Streaks of gold lashed at her face, sweeping over her eyes and back over her shoulders as her small frame twisted violently in the grip of the void.

No. No, no, no, no.

Reality appeared to be bleeding around her, seeming to dilute and pull all the colour from his pink and yellow girl. The green-gold flecks that brightened the whiskey-brown of her eyes seemed to dissipate behind fluttering, translucent lashes, the yellow of her hair fading as it whipped around her in a waning halo. Everything that was his perfect, vibrant Rose was being greedily consumed by the depth of the void in slow motion. Even the misty, golden, swirling strands of time that came naturally to his sight were being stripped from her body, stretching thin and taut, unraveling like threadbare ribbons around her. It was his gift - his curse - as a Timelord to see beyond the rudimentary, three-dimensional mass of her body existing in a linear time stream; instead, in the span of a few brief seconds, he bore witness to an eternity of her essence unraveling before his eyes.

She would be ripped apart, and every piece of her - every molecule, every atom - would be crushed, collapsing into non-existence once she vanished from sight. Her voice, her face, her soul - all that was Rose Tyler would fracture into countless fragments of an interrupted time stream, shredded by the breach. Even if he could return to the TARDIS and somehow defy the laws of time and selfishly risk the stability of the two competing, collapsing universes, he knew there would be nothing left of her to save. The void was everything the universe was not, the opposite of time and space and matter. There was no hope, no salvation, no brilliant, clever solution he could come up with, even if he spent the next nine hundred years of his life studying and searching and hoping and wishing.

Rose.

And suddenly a prismatic flash of light, bright and impossible and rapidly depleting, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. She twisted at the waist, panic in those fading eyes of hers, as the arms of a familiar man folded protectively around her, and suddenly the passing of time resumed it's relative normalcy and before the brightness could be sucked into the abyss they were gone.

Gone.

Stolen.

Saved.

Lost.

So completely and undeniably not there.

Like paper being crumpled, the edges of reality folded in unevenly over itself, creased and wrinkled and shrunk until it turned itself over itself one last time, pulling the last of the parallel universe in on itself and away from this world. The hurricane of depleting reality, now neatly packed away so very far away from where he was, ceased abruptly and without even a sense of waning force, and his body crumpled to the floor.

Everything from his bones to the follicles of his hair hurt, each and every one of his muscles howling in protest as he pushed himself up from the floor. Every part of him felt stretched, torn, broken, and still he clawed at the wall, shaking as he hauled himself to his feet. Stumbling at first, he took a few weary steps forward before he regained his balance and half-limped, half-ran to the unmarred, solid white wall that had only minutes ago been the overlap between two conflicting universes.

Slowly, tenderly, he reached forward to run the flats of his palms over the cool expanse of the wall, sucking in one deep breath before leaning into it, pressing his ear to the ridiculously simple sheet of plaster and drywall. Far away, in a universe running parallel to this one, she would be standing on just the other side of this wall. Beating her fists against the mirrored version of this same wall, or perhaps pressed as closely to it as he was on this side of the void. Cringing, he felt his fingernails scrape lightly against the smooth, surprisingly cool surface as he swallowed a guttural cry of despair as the crushing weight of a fixed point in time settled over him.

Gone.

Stolen.

Saved.

Lost.

Eyes squeezed shut, he sucked in a shuddering gasp of air, tasting bile in the back of his throat. One second passed, and then two, and then three - he was counting, holding his breath - four, five, six seconds - Feeling his insides quake while he stood rigidly, allowing the distance between them to sink in - seven, eight, and nine - before slowly, and in a daze, he pushed himself from the wall to stand upright - ten, ten seconds. Squaring his shoulders, he turned on his heel and walked quietly from the room towards the sanctuary of his TARDIS.

Gone.

Stolen.

Saved.

Lost.

And even with the familiar, elaborate coral-metal hybrid of the console room around him, he felt for the first time in a long time, totally, completely and utterly alone.