Chapter Text
It was a warm, fairly ordinary day when Rose Tyler was on her way home from work. Lost in thought, she walked through the streets of London without noticing that she was heading straight toward someone. That someone was not paying attention either, his eyes fixed on a small device in his hand.
So it was inevitable that the two of them collided.
The young-looking man lifted his head to apologise, but his breath caught mid-motion. Instead of speaking properly, he only mumbled something under his breath before hurrying away and disappearing around the next corner. The blonde woman turned slowly, confused. Before she could say a single word, he was gone. Rose was just about to continue on her way when she noticed something strange lying on the ground. Had the man dropped it?
She picked it up and looked at it, but she could not really tell what it was supposed to be. It looked like a screwdriver, but at the same time, it clearly was not.
The man could not have gone far, so she decided to look for him. She had not really seen his face, but she remembered the long brown coat he had been wearing, which was rather unusual for this time of year. That alone should make him easy enough to find. She turned the same corner he had vanished around and kept walking straight ahead. Less than a minute later, she almost caught up with him. She wanted to call out to him, but she did not know what to say.
He was walking straight toward a blue box. It looked like a telephone box, but somehow it was not. Just as she thought she was close enough, he stepped inside it. He had not noticed her, she was sure of that. She stopped and hesitated. Could she really just go in there after him? It would be fine. After all, it was just a box.
“It is bigger on the inside,” Rose said, the moment she stepped inside.
The man she had followed had not noticed her until now. He stared at her in disbelief. “No. No. No! What are you doing in here?” he shouted, panic rising in his voice.
Slowly, Rose found her words again and held out the object she had picked up earlier. “You dropped this, and I wanted to give it back to you,” she tried to explain.
“That is my sonic screwdriver,” he said, already about to thank her when the situation suddenly caught up with him. “You have no idea what you have just done. The universe could explode any second now.”
Rose frowned. She did not really understand any of this. And what was this box supposed to be anyway? “Explode? And what even is this place? Is this some kind of magic trick?”
“We are in the TARDIS,” he said, and left it at that as he began pacing back and forth in clear distress.
“You are not supposed to meet me like this, not here and not now. Our meeting is a fixed point in time. It has to happen the way it did. Otherwise, you would never have travelled with me, we would never have been on Satellite Five, and I would never have regenerated.”
Rose did not understand a single word of what he was saying. She looked around again, then laughed. “Alright, I get it. We can stop now. Where is the camera?”
“You do not understand. This is serious. You would never have ended up in the parallel universe. You would never have been able to warn us about the Daleks. The universes would have been destroyed. I would never have come here. There would be a total event collapse.”
Rose looked at him uncertainly. The entire situation was starting to scare her.
The man suddenly stopped pacing. “I have to do it,” he whispered.
“Do what?” Rose asked.
He did not answer. He simply walked toward her. “I am so sorry,” he said, looking at her with an expression that was far more than just sadness. It was pain and desperation, and Rose did not understand where it was coming from.
“There is only one option,” he said quietly. He was standing directly in front of her now and placed his fingers against her temples. His warm hands rested almost weakly against her cheeks.
He did not want her to forget him. Even though her time with him had not yet come, she was still the same person. The one who had always been there. The one who meant so much to him. The one he was never meant to see again, because she was already gone.
“Rose…”
“How do you know my name?” she asked.
“I want you to know this,” he said softly. “You are wonderful. And i guess if it's my last chance to say it... Rose Tyler....I love you”
He closed his eyes, and suddenly a sharp pain shot through her.
She collapsed into the arms of the man who loved her. And even though she did not know him, the feeling he stirred in her was incredible.
In the end, he had told her, even if she would never know it. When she woke up, she found herself lying in her own bed, without the faintest idea of how she had gotten there at all.