Repercussions: Prologue

[amberfocus]

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A/N:  Repercussions is the story of alt!Ten and alt!Rose from A Place in Time and is part of the Time Eternal series, but not a direct sequel to anything.  More of a sideways sequel.  It's a romance chock-full of action/adventure, scads of angst, and a happy ending.  If you've read it before there will be a slight rewrite going on, but nothing of great magnitude.  If you haven't read A Place in Time the basic set-up is this.  The Rose of this story travelled with Ten, but he didn't love her, they were only ever best mates.  She loved him.  The Ten of this story permanently lost his Rose in Doomsday and destroyed two universes trying to get back to his Rose whom he loved passionately.  Our Rose, in a burst of Bad Wolf/Rose Plus power put these two lost souls together, supposedly having erased all of their "old" memories.  Not all of it took.

Prologue:  This Rose, That Doctor

In the end it comes down to one thing and one thing only. I am alone here. There will be no last minute hero coming in to save the day. There will be no happy ending. No gentle smile to warm me through and let me know I am not alone. From this moment on there will be nothing. No light to shine through this darkness. No arms to hold me as I fight my way through the fear. No hand to hold, no feet to walk beside mine. No hope of rescue. I watch my heart disappear as the Doctor falls into the Void. That’s why I let go. I feel myself die.

Those memories are so clear and yet obviously they are wrong, for I wake up lying against the wall. And the man beside me, the man I had seen lose his grip and fall screaming into that open space between realities, is most definitely the Doctor. My best friend, the man I am in love with, though I know he’ll never return those feelings. Oh, he has a special fondness for me, but I know he doesn’t fall in love with his companions. His rule number one.

So why is it when I crawl over to his side and touch his face and whisper his name, that his eyes open and the look within them is one of unparalleled joy? Like something has been missing in him until the moment he saw my face and now he is complete? It is so unsettling that I shiver. Why does it feel like someone just walked over my grave?

“Cold, Rose?” he asks sitting up. And his voice, his marvelous voice that has always thrilled straight through me, even on the day I stood frightened and shaking as I watched his body explode in a ball of golden light as he regenerated, is the same. And yet the tone of it is tender. He says my name as a man would whisper a lover’s name. He has never said my name that way before.

I nod, unable to speak and he scoots along the floor, pulling me into his arms. “That was a close one,” he says. “To think we almost lost each other.” And then without warning he kisses my cheek, something he has never done in his effort to keep the boundaries clear between us, and that is when I truly begin to panic. Something has turned my world upside down and somehow, some way, this man who looks every inch the Time Lord I remember, is a stranger to me.

Pt 2:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/58709.html