amberfocus | This Must be What Dying's Like

Title: This Must be What Dying's Like
Author:

amberfocus
Characters/Pairings: Ten2/Rose, Jake Simmonds
Genre: Angst, Romance
Beta:

jeprdyfrndly
Rating: Teen
Warning: Character death
A/N: I couldn't quite leave it with the original ending because it hurt too much. Just couldn't. Written for the

then_theres_us ficathon with the prompt by

professor_spork shown beneath the cut.

This Must be What Dying’s Like

One minute she’s crossing the street, the next she’s laying sprawled on the hard asphalt, her face against the double yellow lines in the middle of the road. She tries to get up, isn’t sure why she can’t until the burst of pain in her hip and the sudden wet warmth of liquid pooling underneath her add together to alert her to the fact that she’s been shot. She hears a scream and knows it’s not hers or she’d feel it in her throat the way it’s torn from the vocal cords of whoever is saying it, whoever is shouting, “Rose!” with such violence and hurt and pain.

She’s heard that sound before, once, a long time ago, when she nearly fell into the Void. The Doctor had sounded like that. It takes her a few minutes longer, or maybe it’s only seconds, maybe time is simply slowing down, before she realizes this is the Doctor, too. It takes until he’s beside her in the street sitting on his knees and reaching for her hand to check her pulse and slowly, carefully, lovingly turning her over.

He’s got his sonic out and for a moment it confuses her. Slowly she remembers. It’s only been a week since he had finished growing this one. Usually the TARDIS had done that, but in the five years they’d been without one, he’d had to find another way. He’d splintered off a tiny piece of the coral the—the other Doctor had given him to try to grow a TARDIS with and had found the right medium to do so only this year. He’s scanning her with one hand and holding desperately to her fingers with the other.

She tries to squeeze it with reassurance, but her fingers won’t obey her commands. “Rose, hold on!” he says desperately.

She can hear a siren in the distance, hears the babble of other voices, familiar voices from far away or maybe quite nearby. She’s not sure she can judge anymore. It’s a fog, a desperate fog, and it’s clouding everything, making words come out like they’re wrapped in cotton wool. She opens her eyes—when did she close them?—and sees Jake. He swims in and out of focus as he drops to his knees beside the Doctor, who is no longer wearing his shirt. She wonders idly where it went.

“The ambulance is coming.”

“I can’t stop the bleeding.” The words are spoken with such despair and again she tries to comfort the Doctor, tries to raise her hand to his face, to cradle that beloved jaw as she’s so often done before kissing him.

“If the ambulance would just get here, I’m her blood type. We can do a transfusion,” Jake says. He takes over pressing something against her hip, putting pressure on the wound and she can barely glance down, see the bundle of white in his hands slowly turning red. Such a pretty shade of red. She understands the words, but she can’t quite reconcile them with her situation.

“She can’t die! I won’t let her die!” There’s so much anguish in his voice and she can’t take it away. The warmth that had soaked the lower half of her body is gone and she feels a chill creeping through her. It’s suddenly so cold and her breaths are coming with more and more exertion.

She’d promised him forever, even just this simple human life of forever, and now she’s gone and broken that promise. “I’m sorry, love,” she croaks out, her voice so weak she doesn’t recognize it. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Her eyes flutter shut again, the effort of holding them open too much for her.

His lips crash down on hers and she wishes for a moment that he was her prince, waking her from some enchanted sleep, but she knows this isn’t waking. This is dying, and he is, after all just a mortal man and she a mortal woman. There is no fairytale here, no big bad wolf come to rescue her or him, and she can’t respond. She wishes she could. It isn’t fair to leave him like this, leave him when he’d expected a whole lifetime with her by his side.

She feels wetness on her face, feels his tears, as they fall onto her. She’s only ever seen him cry once, and that wasn’t this him, but he was losing her forever, all the same. She sighs and it gurgles in her throat.

“I love you, Rose. I love you. Hang on. Hang on! For me. Please, for me!” he begs her.

They are the last words she hears as she lets it all go.

She wakes up naked in the morgue with black hair and blue eyes and the memory of the Doctor’s last kiss still on her lips. Everything hurts and everything feels brand new and as she stares into the shiny round mirror above the sink she thanks a God she didn’t even know she believed in for giving her this second chance. She finds a pair of hospital scrubs and dresses quickly, searches around for her personal possessions and finds them in a thick manila envelope marked Rose Tyler in black felt pen.

She pulls out her mobile, dials his number, and waits.