Last chance to say it. (403 words)
“Rose.” He took a deep breath. Her gaze sharpened on him. “I… This isn’t at all how I wanted to say it, on some windswept beach in a parallel world, but I let myself run out of time.” He sniffed. “Some Time Lord, me.”
It killed him that he couldn’t touch her, that they could only stand, looking at each other, not even real, while he held out his hearts to her. “I let things that were understood go unsaid for far too long,” he forced himself to continue, and heard Rose suck in a breath. “It absolutely will not be my last chance to say it,” he growled fiercely, as his hands clenched and unclenched with the need to be threaded through hers, then softened. “But just in case: Rose Tyler, I love you.”
She gaped at him. Even after their relationship had progressed into physical intimacy, he’d held the words back, feeling that they were inadequate and at the same time too much. Those words were definitive, final, and maybe he’d naively thought that if he refused to define their relationship it couldn’t hurt them. He shook his head inwardly. Daft Time Lord.
Rose had known, had sensed his aversion to the words and held her own back, out of respect, instead showing him in a thousand little ways more eloquent than eight letters of English. But he saw, in that moment, how much she’d needed to hear them from him, and cursed himself for a fool ten times over. Finally she shut her mouth with a snap, shaking her head and smiling at him, and the heat of her love blazed from her eyes and warmed him, even on an icy beach in a different world.
“I know,” she replied. “And Doctor, I -”
The Doctor, bereft of both Rose and the TARDIS’ telepathic contact, again, stood stock still, feeling as though the wind had been knocked out of him. Then, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, his shoulders slumped, and he covered his face with his hands as he took shaking breaths.
It was Mickey who tentatively approached him, an indeterminate amount of time later. “C’mon, boss.” Taking his arm, the other man coaxed the Doctor gently back to the Jeep.
One look at his stony face and no one attempted to engage him in conversation.
He was silent for the entire drive.
