Echoes on AM Static

Summary: Eleven finds an echo of Rose trapped in an old radio. (Concept based on some of my tumblr tags)

He found it not long after his regeneration, buried underneath debris from crash-landing on Amelia Pond's backyard shed. Of course, now she goes by Amy, so in a sense it's been years, but in another it's only been an hour, and he's still trying to figure himself out. It feels odd, this time around – maybe because he came into this life screaming when he came into the last smiling.

An abrupt pang flashed through his chest, as he wondered what she might have said about this face. He'd tried for years not to dwell on Rose Tyler, her face, her voice, but in that moment before he died who else was there to see really? Who else but her?

And now he was left with no time. No more glimpses of that face, no more whispers from that voice, no more chances.

It was a bit depressing really.

So while Amy found something to wear in the Wardrobe Room (with which she had been rightfully impressed), he was clearing up some of the debris the TARDIS herself hadn't. It was mostly junk accumulated in a mound over centuries, because really there are only so many uses for broken (and fixed then re-broken) electronics. It was at the bottom of one of the piles, untouched. It was a small AM radio, which he didn't really have much use at the moment, but it might be useful for some circuitry.

Still, he got an odd feeling from it, as though it were more than just a radio.

He looked at it a moment, shrugged, and tucked it in his dimensionally transcendental pocket before exiting the room.

He leaves it on the jump seat at first, pulling it out of his pocket, turning it over in his hands, before running out of the TARDIS with Amy.

After the Daleks and the blitz (again, he remembers, and it pains him that even if it was the right year, he wouldn't know where Rose was anyway), he takes it to his room, scanning it with the sonic screwdriver and fiddling with the casing. He gets it open, but can't seem to bring himself to strip it down to parts. There seems to be a voice telling him that it would be a bad idea. The TARDIS denies it when he asks her if she's the one doing it (not really a surprise, because the TARDIS emotes at him more than speaks). So instead he bridges broken connectors and gets it in working order. Finally he attaches it to an unlimited power supply, because really, who needs a radio if it doesn't work?

He turns the dial, and the first thing he hears is the tinny strains of a song he'd half forgotten (and oh what a lie that is, it isn't half forgotten, because he remembered every movement, the sound of her trainers on the grating, the feel of her in his arms as he dipped her low, the sheer want he'd felt. He remembers it all too vividly).

He turns the dial again, before he can get lost in the memories (because that's this incarnations fault, he thinks, that he'll hold on to things, hoard them to himself, because he never ever wants to forget; he blames it on her, because all he has is her memory).

This time a voice comes crackling over the speaker grille, garbled and unclear. He uses the tuner a moment longer, as though he really should be picking up AM signals in the Vortex anyway. He uses his sonic to clear up the sound, and what he hears nearly makes his hearts stop.

"Doctor?"

It's her voice. But how can it be her voice?

"Rose?" He breathes, before realizing that she won't recognize this voice, if she can hear it at all.

"Doctor?" The call is plaintive, sad, and more than a bit resigned. "I wish – I miss you. I dunno what's going on really, because I don't know where here is, but it feels like I've been here a while. I don't think you can hear me –"

"Rose." He says again, over her voice.

She just keeps talking. She can't hear him.

He can fix that.

He practically sprints to the storage room where he'd found the radio to find something that he can scavenge parts for a microphone/input to connect to it. So she can hear him. He spends the next hour cobbling it together with spare copper wires, old computer chips, and the inner workings of a lapel microphone. She talks off and on throughout the process, but by the time he's soldered the whole thing into the radio and fixed the casing so that microphone works, she's gone quiet.

There's a stabbing flash of fear that he imagined it all and that he'll wake up staring at the Time Rotor.

It wouldn't be the first time. (Though normally he sees her, not just hears her voice).

"Rose?" He whispers.

He hears a ragged breath. He can't contain the smile that crosses his face.

It takes a while to convince her he's still the Doctor. She's missing some memories, whatever happened to trap this echo of her happened just after the Wire. She doesn't remember the Olympics, Daleks and Cybermen together, or years without him. He's not sure if that's a good thing or not. But once she believes him ("He said those exact words to me, right after you regenerated. Is it really you, Doctor?" she asks her voice filled with something like sadness and something like awe.) it doesn't take long for her to ask if he can set her free.

"Theoretically your consciousness should have already migrated back into your body. You've gotten stuck."

"So what do we need to do?"

"Get your body here and you'd probably just disappear, sucked back where you belong."

She was always too smart for her own good whenever he was trying to hide something, so of course she hears what he doesn't say. "I'm not with you anymore, am I?"

He shakes his head for a long time before he remembers that she can't see him, and that he has to actually say it aloud. "No. Not for a long time, Rose Tyler." (He tries not to dwell on the fit of her name in this mouth, one that will never say it to her face.)

"Did I – Did I die?" She asks, partially frightened and partially sad.

"No. No. You're – You're happy. With me. But not here."

"I don't understand."

"I'm sorry Rose."

He can almost see her shaking her head. "No, it's alright. I'm with you now. That's – something."

"Yes." He whispers, feeling guilty at the undercurrent of happiness because he gets to keep her a while longer yet.

He tells her everything eventually, their adventures that she doesn't remember (never experienced, a tiny part of him whispers) the things he's done since he lost her, since seeing her and losing her again.

One night he moves the radio from the desk where it had rested since he first heard her voice to the newly placed bedside table in his room. He stretches out atop the duvet and talks to her, and listens to her laugh.

It's so natural that occasionally he forgets.

Forgets that she's nothing more than an echo, nothing more than a ghost in the machine.

It's only when one of his hands drifts out to his side and his fingers hit empty air that he remembers. (He tucks his hands behind his head after that.)

He's not sure when he starts telling her goodbye before he leaves the room. Sometime before the universe is rebooted, he knows, because in the Pandorica he runs the last words she said to him over and over in his mind, because he knows that this might make those words the very last he ever hears from her.

"I love you too, Doctor." She'd said.

He realizes now that it wasn't the first time she'd said it. She says it every time he tells her goodbye. (And doesn't that sting? Because he never has said it back, and he's not sure he'll ever be brave enough to say it, because he'll never get to see her eyes light up when he does.)

He tells her he'll come back to her (and his memory flashes to the first time, when he said he couldn't) and she says she loves him.

He closes his eyes, and hopes that he can keep that promise to come back.

Then he tells himself that one day he'll be brave enough to say the words. He pilots the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS.

When he wakes up and sees the radio at his bedside, he instinctively leans over and kisses the plastic casing.

It's a poor substitute for what he really wants.

Sometimes he comes into the room shouting at the universe, at her, at himself, at everything.

"And YOU!" He says with his fists balled in anger, before her voice cuts through his rant.

"'m sorry." She murmurs, and he can hear tears in her voice, and it makes him want to cry himself.

It pulls his anger up short, making it crumple into itself and while there's a seething roil of anger that never really goes away, his rage dissipates, and he finds himself sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands.

"No, Rose. I am. It isn't your fault. It can't be after all. You're just trapped here. I wish I could fix –"

"Don't. I don't ever want to leave you, so now I really won't. Don't apologize for that. It wasn't your fault."

"Just an echo." He mutters under his breath, a reminder, because he can see her in his mind's eye, telling him she'd made her choice.

Sometimes he tries to paint her pictures of the vistas he's showing the Ponds, describing the grass and the sea and the sky of alien planets.

She always is happy when he does, saying how she would have loved to have seen it.

It's a poor substitute for what he really wants – to see her bounce on alien soil, to see her face light up at the view of an alien planet, to hold her hand and tug her through crowded market streets.

He wants. Oh how he wants.

Sometimes, just sometimes, he's happy.

It never lasts for long.

Then they land on House.

It's madness really – meeting his TARDIS, talking to her for the first time, building a TARDIS console out of spare parts while Amy and Rory distract House. It's only standing in the old console room as he tells House how to re-enter the proper universe that it occurs to him that if his room is deleted – he doesn't know if she'd be relocated or not.

He lingers at the console once the TARDIS has disappeared, gone back into the circuitry, her recently found voice now gone forever (at least hellos and goodbyes were said, small comfort that it is). He's afraid of what he might find down the corridors, dreading the sight of an empty wall. He lets the Ponds go, and he waits and tries to convince himself he won't crumble if that's what he finds.

When hours and more than one electrical burn quickly healed with the sonic screwdriver later he wanders into the corridors, he's glad to find the room is still there with everything in its proper place.

"I talked to the TARDIS today," he finds himself saying as he crosses the room.

"I thought you did that everyday, Doctor."

"Not like this."

Rose seems to understand. "Is she still around? Because I think – I think she might have done this somehow."

He shakes his head, before responding. "No, not anymore."

"Oh."

Then he can't stop himself. "I thought I lost you today."

"Wh—"

He talks right over her attempt to question him. "I thought I lost this. Your voice. And I would have lost it without –"

He stops abruptly. "I love you."

It's barely more than a whisper when he says it, but he knows he can't run out of time again. Three times now he's wanted to say it, but ran out of time, or it was the wrong time, or he had to stop himself. If he loses this little bit of her, he doesn't want to run out of time again.

Then suddenly he can see her smile, bright and luminous, just as he can hear it in her voice as she speaks. "I know."