Chapter One

The rain had been coming down in sheets, thunder cracking the heavens as the sky was torn and lit up above him, throwing the light oddly around a blue box that most people would not have even known was there. One particularly savage bolt of lightning flashed somewhere far above him, stretching the shadow of the TARDIS so far it had enveloped his own, the darkness greedily consuming every part of him as he continued forward, it's rectangular reach shrinking back as the light faded deeper into the storm clouds, swallowing up any lingering trace of the man that had given up his everything for the sake of countless people that would never know him. The noise of the storm had suited his mood, the severity of downpour seeming appropriate, Heaven crying the rivers and lakes of unshed tears he simply could not afford to endure, not even when he was left well and truly alone in the bowels of a ship that had stolen him as much as he had stolen her, because he knew once he began he might never stop. There were too many memories to plague him, too many nightmares to haunt him, and too many faces to mourn and shrink away from. As much time as the Doctor had, he hadn't time enough for that.

With the door shut firmly, the roar of the storm had ceased abruptly, the silence following the impossible interruption of the heaving sky sounding unnatural and false. In this moment, even the song of his TARDIS was scarcely louder than a whisper in the back of his mind. The grating of the ramp beneath his feet rang as he climbed it, a queer, squeaking slippery sound coming from his hand as his wet fingers scraped along the handrail. As he reached the console he could not help but lean a bit to the right, peering around the tube of the rotor, hoping against hope to see the smile of a woman who could never remember knowing him, or else perhaps a flicker of pink and yellow that no longer existed in this universe. Had it really only been a matter of hours since this room had been crowded with people? Long lost friends and wayward companions all gathered in one joyous moment of unity and celebration as his ship sang, the touch of so many strays helping to pilot her gently while she returned each and every one of them to where they belonged. And they all belonged somewhere, somewhere out in that stormy world, their lives on the slow path in one linear stretch ahead of them.

After all was said and done, it all came back to this same moment, a history doomed to repeat itself. One old man with two hearts breaking inside a big blue box. A man who, with all his airs and wisdom and superiority, always seemed to finish last. A man whose only path zigged and zagged and held only the promise of inevitable heartbreak and a lonely, bitter end.

It was in these lonely moments that he dared to think of his life before he had become a traveler turned soldier, turned angel of death. He wondered about a life where he had never stolen a TARDIS, or a life that had never involved The Academy or the Time Lords. He would have lived and died as the same man, would never have suffered the calamity of the Last Great Time War, and would never have come to love and lose so much. A simple life on Gallifrey, he had been revolted by the thought of it, the absolute impermanence of a single life lived in a single place. Ah, the arrogance of youth. How young and naive he had been, so full of hope, and so very, very wrong for it.

Time had seduced him, the twisting of the Vortex so incredibly provocative, almost sensual in the way all that ever was and is or could ever be danced just out of reach. It had taken just short of one thousand years for him to realize that the beguiling threads of fate and ribbons of time he had been weaving and unravelling for so long had been braided tightly into a noose that he had always been meant to hang himself with.

Shrugging the incredible weight of his long coat back over his shoulders, he peeled the waterlogged material down his arms and tossed it over a coral strut - the same coral strut that he had retrieved one forgotten jumper that had belonged to a woman he was sure he would never see again. His eyes, bruised with fatigue and the kind of exhaustion that could only come from living as long as he had, lingered on that strut as his mind fixated on the thought of that abandoned jumper, because he dare not let himself think of her.

Turning his back on the strut he leaned over the console, reaching for the furthest switch that his wet fingers could barely pluck at before he slammed a lever upwards and twisted an orb sharply, bringing the grinding rotor to life. Having no energy left for the twirling and dashing about the console he would usually have thrown himself into, he left the console room content to have the TARDIS hanging in the howling of the Vortex. He had nowhere to go, nobody he could turn to in his darkest hour. They had all gone, gone away and on with their lives the way they always had and always would if he was truly masochistic enough to ever open his door to another human. The only one that would always have accepted him, wanted him, would be waiting for him - well, he had left her behind, hadn't he? Left her in a place where he could not get to her, could not be tempted to interfere, leaving her with a hodgepodge of fate and impossible metacrisis craftsmanship to build a life for herself and a better, simpler version of himself.

The thought of that jumper had crept back to the forefront of his mind, nagging at him once he had left the console room, scratching and itching behind his eyes, deep in his skull. He realized too late where he was headed, or had been led to, when he had thought he was aimlessly wandering the halls for lack of anything better to do. That jumper, that ridiculous sentimental scrap of polyester-cotton blend was calling to him, a siren's song that had him doomed in front of her door like a ship breaking on the rocks. He shouldn't be here, he knew it was dangerous - not for any of the usual reasons, the fabric of reality would not tear and burn if he reached for the handle on the door, and untold horrors would not be loosed into all of time and space once the door had swung open. In the gloom of that unused room there were no monsters lurking, no sweeping pathogens or schisms that would send this world careening into the breach. No, it was only dangerous for him and his broken hearts, and tonight of all nights was probably the most dangerous to have ended up here.

He wished that he could have simply walked away. He wished that he had some reason to keep from stepping over the threshold, or anyone left to warn him to turn back, to run from this place and leave the lights off, turn and run and never stop. He was good at that, usually. Tonight, however, he could not have taken any more than the few steps it took to reach the lamp at the far side of the room, not if his life and the lives of everyone in the world depended on him.

He winced as the bulb came to life, a warm incandescent light flooding the room, casting long and dark shadows the way the lightning had outside the TARDIS. The bed was unmade, a heap of rumpled pink blankets pooled near the end of the mattress, the sheets creased as if they had recently been slept in. As far as the TARDIS was concerned, they had been. He knew that if he dared, if he could summon the courage and just reach out and allowed himself to press his hand into the sheets they might even have been warm. This room, since she had been lost to him, had existed outside of time. This was a haunted place he had kept frozen, like a small life snuffed out and encased in amber.

He realized he had been holding his breath, his respiratory bypass protecting him from what he knew would be the familiar scent of her, all vanilla and coconut and not even remotely floral. He remembered he had found that charming, but dared not indulge the masochistic part of him that urged him to breathe deeply and remember.

His lips set in a grim line he turned his attention from the bed to the nightstand and glared down at a traitorous glass, half-filled with water, the rim shining with the imprint of her glossed lips. There was a book next to it, one that he recognized from his library as being a bit of 'light reading' he had given her when she had given him one too many blank stares when he had gone on about the laws and limitations of time and space. She had threatened to chuck it at his ego-swollen head and he had assumed that she had returned it to the library in a huff; a small, nearly hysterical laugh bubbled up in the back of his throat at the sight of it now, the pages visibly worn and heavily dog-eared. Oh, bless, she had tried so hard to be more for him even though she had been perfect just as she was. He could almost picture her curled up in bed with that book, the girl who had been stuck on the fact that she did not even have her A-levels, boggling over an introduction to quantum mechanics with a well chewed pen dangling from her lips.

Before he could stop himself, he had reached for the tiny drawer built into the nightstand and pulled it creakily open. He found a half-consumed packet of contraceptive pills hidden within, a tube of lip gloss, and a slim, pink shaft of plastic with a ring of buttons at the base, a slot at the bottom suggesting a pair of batteries inside. It took him a moment to piece together what it was, so plain and unassuming, but when he had he spoke harshly, the jangling of his native language making even the most crude of curse words sound musical.

He slid the drawer carefully shut, feeling as if he had violated her privacy in some truly unforgivable way. She had thrown away her entire life for him, even the love of a good man who had always been enough for her before he had sauntered into her life, all big ears and daft smiles. He knew she was a sexual being and had certainly been with men before she had met him, but she had given all that up when she had run away with a madman in a box. Was he surprised that she had brought something like this along, considering the amount of time she had spent here? It would be weeks or even months at a time before he would drop her home for a bit of a break, and he had known somehow that she had not been seeing anyone else when he was away. She had needs and desires, and he knew she had wanted him, loved him, but she was patient and understanding and never asked more from him than he was ready to give. That sleek, bubblegum-pink device had helped her to be with him, had helped her through all the lonely nights he wished so desperately he could have changed, to go back and be with her the way she had needed him then.

Turning away from the nightstand and it's contents, he turned instead to face the small desk that stood opposite the bed. It was topped with papers and pens and what he knew was her journal, one of the few books in the universe he had been curious about but had never flipped through. She had threatened more than his life when he had come across it, left on the jump seat in the console room. It was private, he knew. He let his fingers drift over the hard cover, recognizing the ornately inscribed leather bindings as something she had picked up from a bazaar on a planet that had been swallowed by it's own sun thousands of years before she was born. He was tempted, he could not deny that, but snatched his fingers away from the cover of the book as if he had been burned before he could insult her memory any further.

Leaving the journal undisturbed, his attention turned to the neatly folded jumper that had led him here in the first place, the same jumper she had left hanging over a coral strut in the console room the day they had arrived at Canary Wharf. The same jumper that had a frightened a misplaced bride who had accused him of kidnapping and luring women away from their homes, which he supposed was not entirely untrue.

He had been constantly nagging her about leaving her things lying about when they had first begun traveling together, but by the time he had regenerated into the body he had now he had come to like seeing bits and pieces of her left here and there, reminding him even when she had retired to her bedroom to sleep or read or - he shook his head, derailing that train of thought violently - whatever... That he was not alone. She had promised him forever, her entire forever, and he had believed her. When he had returned to his ship alone that night he had not even noticed the jumper hanging over the strut, it was so entirely normal and just belonged, so it had blended in with the rest of the room as he numbly went about flipping switches and twisting dials until he had come across the exact right supernova he needed just to say goodbye.

He had only come into her room once after that, and he had been in and out and in so much pain he could barely stand to have it remain onboard his ship, considering more than a few times that it might be best to jettison the entire thing into the vacuum of space. It had never come to that though, and he had only lingered long enough to hide her folded jumper away in her room before moving it and her room as far away from his bedroom and the console room as he could manage.

Suddenly, he was not quite sure what he was doing in here, rifling through her things like a thief in the night. The jumper had been here for months, this room sealed like a tomb and locked away from him and any of the companions that had come along in her absence. It had no special properties, and the only thing that made it important was that it had once belonged to her, and that made it dangerous as well. He spun on his heel, determined to leave and lock this room and never return when the bulky shape of something black hanging from the back of her door caught his eye.

If he were being honest with himself, he was fairly sure he knew what it was even before he had crossed the room, retrieving it from the hook that hung from the back of her door with shaking fingers. It all became too much for him then, and as he stumbled backwards, her bed coming up to press against the back of his legs and knock him cleanly off his feet, he sat down heavily on the edge of the mattress as so many unshed tears burned and threatened what was left of his sanity, the crumpled leather jacket blurred and fading in and out of focus before he screwed his eyes shut. The black leather was soft and well worn, pliable and smooth in his hands as he crumpled it in his hands, bringing it up to his face to inhale the mixed scent of his last body and everything that was Rose - her skin, her tears, her hair.

He hadn't known she had kept this jacket, had imagined that it was hanging forgotten in the back of the wardrobe where he had left it. He realized with a pang of guilt and horror and heartbreak that she must have gone back for it, stolen it from it's hanger and kept it for herself. One piece of her first Doctor, something familiar and tangible to comfort her whenever she needed comforting, whenever she needed to feel him close to her when he dared not be close to her. How many times had she slept clutching this jacket, he wondered? The material was clean, not a single speck of dust clinging to it, suggesting she had touched it often. She had kept his jacket the way he had kept her jumper, hidden away and always somewhere she could find it if she needed it.

Oh, Rose. He had thought his hearts had broken for her at every angle, and that there was nothing left of them to break. He had been wrong, and he gasped, sucking in that familiar vanilla-coconut scent that was Rose Tyler, a low keening sound escaping his lips as he rocked himself, clutching that old jacket tightly to his chest.

He was sure he was going to fall apart then, that he would finally succumb to the many horrors and tragedies of his life and sit and cry and rage in this pocket of the Vortex outside of time, allowing himself an eternity and no time at all to grieve the loss of so much once and for all. He had almost felt relief as he felt it all building up in him, a dam with so many cracks and leaks about to burst, but somehow it never came. Instead, his eyes - burning, but dry - darted between her jumper and his jacket and suddenly he was moving. Running, his hearts pounding in his chest as he skidded to a halt just in front of the console.

He was punching buttons, slamming levers this way and that, spinning dials and plucking at cords that he tore from one device only to thread into the circuit of another. Sparks exploded from every crevice of the console and the rotor stuttered and squealed and creaked with the effort it took to heed the crazed pilot. The ring of a cloister bell earned a mad laughing fit from him as he careened around the console, his hands moving quickly over the controls, words of encouragement and reproach and pleading and threats flowing from him in the musical clanging of his mother tongue, compelling his TARDIS as she did her best to resist the will of her Thief.

It did not matter that he had risked everything, the stability of the universe and all of time and space, just to get to her. He did not care if he punched a hole in the fabric of reality as his ship crashed through still-healing cracks that allowed him entry to that forbidden world, and as he prepared himself for impact, clutching the console with a whoop of abandon the song of the TARDIS reached a crescendo in his mind and everything fell into darkness.

A/N: Wow, all of that came to me so quickly I had to get it all down before I lost it, and here I am still awake with the sun coming up, but I think it was worth it considering how this turned out. I had wanted to write a darker story involving the Doctor and Rose, and it looks like this is where I'll truly get a chance to explore that.

If you enjoyed the chapter as heartbreaking piece the way my 'AFPIT: Doomsday' story was written than I would say it is safe to leave it here, as the next chapter will be dark and sexual and not at all a happy place to be. If you're like me, you won't be able to resist and will enjoy the twisted change of pace, but I wanted to write the end of this chapter in such a way that you can imagine whatever happens next in a way that makes you more comfortable. So, that's my gift to you, you have been warned!

This story is written between the episodes of "Journey's End" and the "The Waters of Mars". The plot will be written in such a way that it will not affect or change the cannon, and will fit nicely in the space between episodes.

I was listening to "Sparks" by Royskopp while I wrote this. Definitely sets the mood in the beginning. Cheers. TBW.